Security

We take security very seriously. Our approach to securing Plone sites is as follows:

• Confidential data include, but are not limited to, the following:
  • Social Security numbers: no university unit or department should be asking for or storing these with the exception of HR and Financial Aid which must track them for financial reporting purposes
  • Grades, medical, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and similar data that can be connected to an individual
• No confidential data may be stored in a Plone site that runs on the production servers, which are a shared resource.
• If a Plone site must store confidential data, it must reside on its own server. This requires the purchase of two servers: one for production and one for development/testing. Servers do not need to be particularly powerful or beefy; expected network traffic and the complexity of computations performed by the Plone site must be taken into account but in general are not onerous. (Alternatively, it may be possible to create virtual servers to run your site, again depending on the expected CPU load and traffic; creation and support costs will vary).
• All Plone logins are carried out over an encrypted SSL ("https") connection.
• Sessions on Plone sites running on the production servers may run in encrypted ("https") or unencrypted ("http") mode. For example, you can access this site via http for faster but unencrypted browsing or you can access it via https for slower but encrypted browsing (by changing "http" to "https" in the URL).
• Secured Plone sites are visible to users only over an encrypted SSL ("https") connection.
• No passwords are stored in browser cookies.