Infosecurity

Fear moves to documents

By Alice Kok | 30 August 2008

Inherent in the 21st century is a need to be secure and this genetic make-up of the global society does not leave out the area of electronic documents.

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Document security refers to protecting information at the content level, it is security a step above that of “information security”. In this age of terrorism and paranoia, loss of data generates tsunami of fear across the population. There are websites dedicated to who committed these shameful mistakes and when such as breachblog.com and hackinthebox.org, and offending organisations are accused of in this manner: “The Sydney West Area Health Service has been embarrassed by the discovery of medical records in an abandoned amusement park.”

And such data breaches are innumerable. 2008 April, Hong Kong lost detailed records of interviews with 700 troubled adolescents along with their contact details through a stolen flash drive; United Kingdom had their Driving Standards Agency contractor lose records of three million people in 2007 and this year lost 600,000 details of would-be recruits by a Naval officer; July this year, Korea had nine million files of credit information stolen by a Chinese hacker and sold to loan firms.

Data losses taint the trust the public holds for the organisation responsible hence making it extremely important to the public sector that the data in their possession is kept safe.

What document security means What once protected the information through firewall access control lists (ACLs), identity management systems, and access permission is no longer enough to protect an organisation. Information security stops its protection at storage and transport process—document security, on the other hand, relates to what is in the documents and how they can be used, modified, or shared once access to the document is gained.

It may sound daunting, but security software vendors Workshare and Adobe, assure that it will be easy. John Landwehr, Director of Adobe’s Security Solutions and Strategy, says, “Ease of use is a top design goal along with strong encryption and other security features. If security is too complicated, people won’t be able to use it properly.”

With the grounds document security has to cover, the challenges are pervasive. According to Gartner and IDC research, each year has more than 1.8 trillion business documents and 2.4 trillion e-mails created. Out of this sum, 25 to 30 per cent contain document attachments riddled with business and technical risks that threaten privacy, compliance and security. In the office itself, 53 per cent of employees surveyed have found details not belonging to them on shared printers.

Of interest to both public and private sector is what Matt Marshall, Research Director at IDC, has to say: “These findings do appear to be shocking especially in terms of today’s compliance driven business environment. Many companies may unknowingly be breaking legislation and commercial agreements in terms of client and employee sensitive data such as company financials and personal information.”

Mary Jost, a Senior Director at Workshare concurs that the most important consideration for document security is the risk the organisation faces if the document content is exposed either to unauthorised insiders or to outsiders. “This risk varies depending on the type of content. In commercial organisations, trade secrets and intellectually property are their highest value information content but for a government organisation, the highest risk is faced with information content related to national security.”

Aspects of Document Security While it is not impossible for an organisation to take a holistic approach for both electronic and paper documents, document security should not be compromised by expecting a single technology or solution to complete the task. Because business processes around computer automation are usually separate from paper-based processes, a holistic approach has to be achieved through a collaboration of its various aspects.

Most important for document security is a capability referred to as Enterprise Rights Management (ERM). This allows for the opening of a protected document to authenticate and authorise a user. ERM is a part of data loss prevention strategy to protect electronic documents’ confidentiality and privacy. ERM protects the content in its own file container, hence staying within the document—on desktops and servers, inside and outside an organisation, and through web sessions, emails, and removable media such as discs and tokens.

Not only is access to documents restricted by ERM software, ERM also limits what a user can do with the document once access is gained. These include protections for printing, modification, and clipboard actions restrictions. Furthermore, ERM can set documents to expire on absolute or relative periods of time and be persistently version-controlled at the document level—no matter the number of copies floating around in an organisation, the rights management server is able to disable opening of the document by revoking it entirely.

What Adobe recommends is a security approach coupling ERM with digital watermarking. Ashley Wearne, Managing Director of South East Asia Adobe believes that this is “a good approach for providing preventative and detective document security controls for both electronic and paper documents.”

Digital watermarking refers to applying a visual watermark to every page of the document either unobtrusively as a header or footer, or visibly splashed diagonally across a page. This watermark can include whatever restrictions are assigned to the document and the name of the user viewing it along with the date and time. All these information will appear too in the printed version. A dynamic watermark will allow for a single document to be opened by multiple recipients without persisting in the document when it is closed. Hence, the document can be sent to other authorised users wherein the watermark will reappear with relevant user details.

Used with ERM, it ditigal watermarking is such that a document is allowed to be printed only on the condition of it being watermarked. Interesting to note is Jost’s contrasting view that “Digital Watermarking is a limited technology from a security point of view. For content analysis in an information security context, it has a very limited value.”

But fret not because all there is to securing your documents isn’t digital watermarking per se. Other solutions commonly seen are encrypted documents, digital signatures and most importantly, process control.

With encrypted documents, a Computer Aided Design (CAD) assembly can contain multiple parts—each with a different management policy. So depending on which user opens the assembly, he/she may see all of the parts, or a subset of the parts. Further limitations can restrict what the user can do with the protected parts; some sensitive parts may be protected but still visible but not modifiable or printable.

For text-based documents, a common practice is redaction—a process whereby a sensitive document is sanitised for further and broader dissemination when its sensitive contents are removed instead of just being hidden. Landwehr says, “Simply drawing a black rectangle over a section may visually hide the information, but the content is still in the document and subject to examination. The proper approach is to use a redaction tool to completely remove confidential content from the document whether the content is in text or pictures format.”

Next to come along are digital signatures. This technology is able to cryptographically provide assurances of the author and approvers of a document as well as what has or has not been modified. Again, this is a solution that stays within the content and is independent of both storage and transport, and whether the document stays inside or moves out of the organisation in question.

A simpler aspect of such signatures will be moving paper documents with ink signatures to digitalised formats. This means that PDF documents and forms can be published with author signatures. Such certified documents, along with an authentic email address or website, provide added assurances to recipients of the documents’ origins.

The last aspect of document security in an organisation—but definitely not the least—is process control. An information classification system in an organisation will deploy document access privileges based on a combination of role or group settings. “In simpler terms, decide on who can access what documents based on the business role and organisation group the user belongs to,” explains Jost.

The key behind this technology is to first organise the data in appropriate application files or file server folders with different tags applied based on the sensitivity of the documents. Policies can also be mapped to content management systems such that the access to a folder containing the documents has the same access control that persists with the document after it leaves the server.

A holistic approach Common sense will dictate a combination of all the technologies to have maximum document security.

Data has to be organised, user access and privileges must be defined, documents must be set with permissions for printing, modification, and clipboard actions then encrypted and signed (even if only digitally), redaction should be used to remove sensitive parts of a document, and as and when applicable, watermarking should be deployed.

Jost tells that a good mix of the above technologies will impose a leak prevention that “makes way for a relationship with preventive solutions for document printouts that cannot be photocopied, or convert documents such that it cannot be printed.”

Even when dealing with paper documents, policies can be applied such that when these are scanned to digital, an Optical Character Recognition technology in Multifunction Peripherals (MPFs) can treat the scans with the same censorship given to original electronic documents.

The best approach to safeguarding both paper and electronic documents—choose your combination carefully, and be organised.