Case Study - Medical Records SSL

Background: A medical records company is required to use Secure FTP (FTP using SSL) to upload and download confidential medical records. A Secure FTP server (Serv-U) is running on a server where these records are stored. The medical records company wants to use FTP Voyager to maintain these using their DSL connection.

Problem: The medical records company is subscribed to a service that provides 3 IP addresses for its service. A NAT (Network Address Translation) DSL router is used to give Internet access to 50 client computers. Standard FTP works great because the NAT router can translate private IP addresses (from the LAN) into public IP addresses (for the Internet). The NAT router, however, cannot do this for SSL (Secure FTP) connections because the data being transferred can only be decrypted by Serv-U. In order to make the Secure FTP transfers work the NAT router needs to "interpret" and translate the commands, since it's encrypted it doesn't understand the commands.

Solution: Install AllegroSurf on a computer that has a public IP address, setting up a SOCKS server inside AllegroSurf and configuring FTP Voyager to use SOCKS5 going through the AllegroSurf proxy server. SOCKS is a proxy protocol that is independent from an application protocol such as FTP, where the SOCKS client (FTP Voyager in this case) has total control of the connection to and from the server, not requiring any translation and allowing the client and server to use full SSL (Secure FTP) transfers.

Benefits: The data transferred between Serv-U and FTP Voyager is fully encrypted as required by law, yet the medical records company does not need to subscribe to a more expensive Internet service to obtain more IP addresses. Each client computer is fully isolated from the Internet, yet all data is encrypted. Adding additional computers to the company's LAN is simple and requires no Internet reconfiguration; AllegroSurf does the work for them.