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Deploying Philter in a HIPAA Environment

This is not intended to be a comprehensive or legal HIPAA guide so please refer to your HIPAA compliance or security officer prior to deploying and using Philter in a PHI environment.

The steps below outline how to configure a Philter deployment for encryption of data at rest and in motion.

Encryption of Data at Rest

Amazon Web Services

  1. Stop the Philter EC2 instance.
  2. Make an AMI of the instance.
  3. Make an encrypted copy of the Philter AMI.

The created AMI is encrypted. EC2 instances launched from the AMI will utilize an encrypted EBS volume and all snapshots will be encrypted. Refer to the AWS documentation Creating an Amazon EBS-Backed Linux AMI for assistance.

Encryption of Data in Motion

Amazon Web Services

If launched from the Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure marketplace Philter's REST API will be pre-configured with a self-signed certificate. It is recommended you replace the self-signed certificate with a certificate from a trusted certificate authority.

  1. Log in to the Philter EC2 instance via SSH. (On AWS the username is ec2-user. On Azure the username is centos.)
  2. Stop the Philter service: sudo systemctl stop philter.service
  3. Edit Philter's settings to utilize an SSL certificate.
  4. Start the Philter service: sudo systemctl start philter.service
  5. Connect to Philter's API and verify the connection succeeds: curl https://philter:8080/api/status and returns HTTP 200 OK.