Security

The IU Bloomington Evaluation Services and Testing at IUB strives to keep users' information secure on all web-based services provided. This document describes some of the measures taken to accomplish this goal. Information security is viewed as an ongoing process, not as an event or product. Therefore, our job is to constantly look for ways to improve and reassure our system's confidentiality, integrity, availability, and accountability.

BEST Moves to Veritas

On January, 2001 BEST transferred all web-based services and documents from a locally maintained server to the main IU web server administered by the Web Technology Services group at University Information Technology Services (UITS). This move represented a slight increase in computer processing power, but most importantly a significant improvement in information security. These are some of the security-related attributes of having our web services hosted by UITS:

User authentication with IU Network ID for all services
Authentication performed by web server (system does not collect passwords)
Secure layer (encryption) capability provided by web server
Verisign secure certification
Tight physical security of UITS machine room
Data backups are performed daily
System statistics are easily accessible

Additional Security Efforts

Beyond all the security measures provided by on the Veritas server, we take additional measures to assure information security. Our duties as webmasters include:

Making sure correct access permissions are assigned to every file and directory on our site
Monitoring the system and fixing (or reporting) any possible security bridges
Installing (or requesting installation) and testing of new security measures as they become available

To learn more about information security issues and efforts, please visit the BEST Security Resources page.