How to NIST?

1. Authentication

   You should have received an MFA YubiKey from the Paragon IT Support team. MFA stands for Multi-factor Authentication and is a multi-step account login process in which users need to enter more information than just a password in order to authenticate that they are who they say they are and maintain secure business data. Certain customers of Paragon require their data to be secured using the NIST Cybersecurity framework which involves encrypting data at rest and in transit among other things. You can read more about this in the Wiki article: Nist – What is it? This key will be used in addition to your standard windows account password to securely connect you with the NIST server.

   You should have also been set up with several NIST links which are likely in a NIST folder on your computers desktop. Inside this NIST folder, you should see 2 folder shortcuts (NIST PICs and NIST Workspace) as well as an Internet shortcut (NIST Watchguard). Until you are Authenticated, you won’t be able to navigate the folder shortcuts. If clicked on, Windows will attempt to navigate to the shortcut destinations and fail. Depending on the specific state of your authentication and how windows is interpreting this, you may see different errors ranging from a problem with the shortcut in which the item has been changed or removed (even though it hasn’t) or that you simply just don’t have access to the location it is trying to access.

   Double click on Nist Watchguard (The Internet shortcut), or right click on it and select the option to ‘Open’. This will open the watchguard login page in your default browser. Note that this is different from the watchguard page (for those applicable) that gives you internet access.

   1. Click in the textbox next to the ‘Username:’ label.
   2. Insert your YubiKey into a USB port on your computer.
   3. The ‘y’ should light up (meaning that it was detected by the system)
   4. Press on the ‘y’ with your finger. This will activate the key and fill in your generated code into the ‘Username’ field.
   5. Enter your windows account password and click the Login button
   6. You should now be authenticated, verified by a success page telling you so.

2. Navigating the NIST Server

   Now that you have successfully authenticated with the NIST Server, you can access the folder shortcuts I mentioned earlier.

   1. NIST PICs
      If you navigate into this folder by double clicking on it, or right click and select the ‘Open’ option, you should see 2 primary folders. The Jobs and the Quotes folders. These folders should be treated the same as if you are using the PICs application. Only completed files should be put here for public use, or files getting ‘checked in’ for backups overnight in case someone else will need to work on them the following day(s).
      • Do not open and modify these files directly.
      • Do not, under any circumstance, copy these to a local directly on your computer.
   2. NIST Workspace
      The workspace folder contains a folder for each user and navigating this link should bring you directly to yours. Only you and NIST admins (from Paragons IT team) have access to this workspace. Your personal workspace is not shared, however the storage space allocated for your workspace is shared by all users. Please do not leave files here if they are not actively needed any longer. There are several shared workspaces, and any other users with permissions to those folders have access to the files in them. These should be used with caution as they don’t enforce data security as strongly.

3. Using NIST

   • Do not open and modify these files directly.

   • Do not, under any circumstance, copy these to a local directly on your computer.

   • Standard operation is that when you are using a file it should be copied to your personal workspace folder. It should remain there, on the server, in your workspace folder, until you are done with the file and then it should be copied back into the Jobs/Quotes folders where the files originally came from. Because there is not currently an app to manage the sub folders for each Job/Quote, you may need to manually create the sub folders to match the PICs folders that are created for non NIST jobs and files such as the notes log.

More info to come…