Enabling E- Discovery without Creating Vulnerabilities

October 16, 2018

E-Discovery has long been a necessary investigative tool for the enterprise. Whether you’re in finance, law , biotech or defense, there will be times when your firm’s IT administrator might require the ability to access an employee’s emails or files for purposes such as litigation or regulatory compliance. Yet by providing IT teams with the ability to run E-Discovery, companies inadvertently make their IT Administrators a prime target for hackers. If admins can access a user’s entire trove of files, emails and logs, then so can an attacker who compromises the admin’s credentials.

PreVeil’s cybersecurity and encryption researchers have broken this paradox by combining its patented Approval Groups^TM capability with a new E-Discovery Data Export module. The new E-Discovery Data Export module enables enterprises to easily complete necessary investigations while not leaving the corporation open to a single point of compromise.

Leveraging PreVeil Approval Groups^TM

PreVeil’s E-Discovery Data Export capabilities wouldn’t be possible without Approval Groups. Approval Groups allow PreVeil to cryptographically distribute trust across a predetermined set of admins so that no single person can compromise the entire enterprise. IT can still gain full access to corporate data but only after receiving cryptographic authorization from a critical mass of authorized admins.

Approval Groups can be thought of as though someone cut their house key into pieces and gave each piece to a neighbor. None of these neighbors can enter the house on their own but together they can recreate the key. Similarly, Approval Groups enable admins to gain access to necessary data only after receiving approval from the necessary members of the group.

An Approval Group provides the necessary cryptographic consent which enables a privileged action such as E-Discovery Data Export to take place.

Enabling E-Discovery Data Export

The E-Discovery Data Export is able to proceed after the admin has:

1. Initiated Data Export in PreVeil

2. Received cryptographic approval from the required number of approvers in the Approval Group

3. Determined a target destination folder (either on a local machine, or a network drive). This folder will capture all emails that were ever sent, received or drafted. Additionally, the folder will also capture all files ever saved on PreVeil Drive.

At the end of the E-Discovery process, the privacy and integrity of the user’s inbox can be reestablished by cryptographically sunsetting the user’s original private key and creating a new one.  PreVeil cryptographically rekeys the relevant email and file collections with a newly created key. This ensures that the keys retrieved to complete the E-Discovery Data Export could not be reused if a malicious actor was able to obtain them.

Conclusion

The E-Discovery Data Export module is one of many new Approval Group-based features that PreVeil will be rolling out in the months to come. At the core of each of these features is the aim to enable enterprise IT Administrators to obtain the privileged access they need without creating a single point of failure for the organization.

If you would have any questions, would like to see a demo, or would like to do a free trial of PreVeil’s new E-Discovery Data Export module, contact us.