Keeping Your Research Safe

Scenario: Secure Online Collaboration

You're a researcher collaborating on a project with a colleague in a different country. Your research is highly confidential and will result in an important paper. You need to make sure no one except your colleague can see your preliminary results, but you need to discuss them and it's difficult to find a time slot when you're both awake, thanks to the difference in time zones.

You think a secure online exchange of information is your best option, but you want to be really sure that nobody else can intercept your data as it travels through the network.

What you can do

You'll need to keep your information and your conversations about the project safe, both in online storage and through email. NetFiles, PGP, and the UIUC VPN system are tools that can help make your communications with your colleagues both simple and secure.

Secure storage, access control, and version management with NetFiles

CITES NetFiles offers secure storage that you can share with collaborators from across the state or around the world, whether or not they're University of Illinois affiliates. You can make a file viewable by anyone in the world, or restrict access so that only you and one other person can see it. You can also make the file editable by yourself and your colleague -- whether or not that colleague is a UIUC affiliate or has a NetID. In addition, NetFiles' built-in version control helps make sure that only one of you is editing the file at a time.

Security precautions to take with email and wireless access

Email isn't automatically secure from end to end. Most email can be read by any computer in the path it travels from your email server to the recipient's server.

If you're sending any sort of sensitive information through email, make sure that you use add-on encryption such as PGP, so that the email's intended recipient is the only person who can read it. (Although CITES Express Email and other secure web-email interfaces do encrypt information from your computer to the email server, your email is not automatically encrypted from one email server to another. If the email itself isn't encrypted with PGP, it can be read by any mail server in the network, not just by your intended recipient.)

The email security scenario explains more about how to keep your email private while it's traveling across the network.

In addition, if you sometimes use a wireless network, see the wireless security scenario for ways to use the UIUC VPN system to receive secure network access from any wireless network anywhere in the world.