NAS In-Flight Encryption

Introduction

Information Technology deals with transmitting and storing a lot of data.  Some of this information may be classified as PHI, Personal Health Information, and PII, Personally Identifiable Information, which is regulated by laws enacted by the US (HIPAA & SOXA) and foreign governments (GDPR).  To protect personal information from being corrupted or leaked to others that might use the information to negatively impact an individual there are requirements for protection of integrity and privacy.  To meet privacy requirements either encryption and isolation or both are specified by standard documented or referenced by government regulations.  

Network Attached Storage is typically accessed either as file based storage through NFS exports or SMB CIFS shares or as block storage through iSCSI.  Since NAS storage traverse enterprise networks it is recommended that connections to NAS be encrypted especially in the case where HIPAA or Sensitive PII may be accessed and transmitted across the network.  This article covers how to enable and configure encryption in-flight for NAS Strorage.