FERPA Guidlines & Compliance

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA), also known as the Buckley Amendment, is the most important federal regulation affecting colleges and universities. It protects the privacy of student records by limiting disclosure of information from the records.

How does CipherOptics help?
CipherOptics CipherEngine enables Secure Information Sharing, which assures the confidentiality, authenticity, and integrity of data in motion on any network. Our approach to protecting both your network and your data is to deny access to everyone, permit by exception. With that as our driving force, our solutions provide you with both encryption and authentication of all your critical information.

We use 256-bit AES encryption that is approved by the government for "sensitive but unclassified" information; our solutions authenticate networks and packets, as well as, protect data. Using the robust secure hash algorithm (SHA-1) to verify the integrity of the data, rejecting any packets that have been manipulated or altered.

CipherEngine can also help protect private student data in storage by thwarting intrusion at the network level, not at the storage level. Its deterministic firewall feature can reject any packets that lack proper encryption-based authentication. Thus, only data originating from the other end of the data protection tunnel can pass through to the storage network. This effectively turns the storage network dark to all unauthenticated traffic from the network.

CipherOptics Secure Information Sharing solutions offer a reliable and proven method of ensuring FERPA requirements for data confidentiality. They are an essential part of best practices to meet FERPA compliance.

CipherOptics security gateways offer a reliable and proven method of ensuring FERPA requirements for data confidentiality. They are an essential part of best practices to meet FERPA compliance.

What does CipherOptics do?
CipherOptics is the leader in network-wide encryption. Offering an innovative policy and key management solution, coupled with high speed, low latency encryption technology, CipherOptics helps their customers mitigate the risk of data leakage, loss and theft over any network.

Who is affected by FERPA?
FERPA applies to all educational institutions that are recipients of federal funding.

What are the requirements of FERPA?
An educational agency or institution is prohibited from disclosing personally identifiable information from the student's education records without consent (34 CFR 99.30-39). This places a requirement on institutions to protect the confidentiality of student records and personal information. While the law does not spell out specific privacy safeguards, the mandate to protect sensitive information certainly requires the implementation of data security measures.

What are the penalties for FERPA non-compliance?
If the educational agency or institution does not comply, the federal government may:

Withhold further payments under any applicable program
Issue a complaint to compel compliance through a cease-and-desist order
Terminate eligibility to receive funding under any applicable program

How do institutions comply with FERPA?
FERPA assures students that their records are protected from access by others. In order to comply with FERPA, colleges and universities must protect personally identifiable student data in storage and when it is most vulnerable-traveling on the network. Encryption is a proven technology to ensure the confidentiality of sensitive information in motion and to comply with the data protection requirements of FERPA.

Helpful Resources
Complete FERPA Guidelines