Deployment Guide › Content Registration › How Fingerprinting Works

How Fingerprinting Works

Fingerprinting in CA DLP relies on content agents, content indexes and specialized policy triggers.

Content agents

Each content agent has a list of protected files. These are files stored on your network whose content has already been scanned and fingerprinted. You can have as many content agents as you need. For example, you may have separate agents to fingerprint documents owned by the Finance and HR teams.

You need to create your content agents before you can roll out fingerprinting across your CA DLP enterprise. For details about creating content agents, see the Deployment Guide or the Administration console online help.

Note: The Content Registration feature uses File Scanning Agent technology to scan files and generate fingerprints.

Content indexes

A content index is a list of fingerprints for all the files protected by an individual content agent. You must manually build the index after creating a content agent. You must then publish the index to the CMS to make the content agent available to your policy engines and endpoint agents.

If the list of files protected by a content agent changes, you must rebuild and republish it. If you build an index again, it contains the fingerprints for original list of protected files plus the fingerprints any new or modified files. This means that the rebuilt index may contain fingerprints for both new and old versions of the same file. To eliminate multiple versions of the same file from the index, you must purge and rebuild the index.

If the file list changes are substantial, or if you remove a document from the protected files list, we recommend that you purge the index and then rebuild and republish it.

To build an index, CA DLP runs a specialized FSA scanning job.

Content agent triggers

A content agent trigger uses content agents to identify protected files. When the trigger analyzes a file (for example, an email attachment), it generates a digital signature, or fingerprint, for that file. It then compares that fingerprint with lists of known fingerprints. If the fingerprints match, a policy trigger fires. You must set up your user policies to use content agent triggers before your fingerprinted files are fully protected.