August 2003 Mfg.Trust

Mfg.Trust is a monthly feature of the
            NCMS InfraGard Manufacturing Industry Association
                        Infrastructure assurance for manufacturers
                                    Powered by NCMS.

This month – SECURING DIGITAL DOCUMENTS

Editor's Preface:

This month’s feature will address the securing of computer files that contain documents, with an emphasis on protecting the interests of their owners as they circulate in an extended enterprise. It is also important to protect important printed documents (your passport or credit card, for instance), but that topic deserves its own feature.

The practice of applying persistent security features to files as they move around your enterprise (or your competitor’s enterprise) is just coming of age for industrial and general business customers, as Adobe and Microsoft move into the market. There are many pros and cons to consider before you invest.

Persistently secure documents are one part of a ‘defense-in-depth’ security effort. Malicious parties or even ‘untrained employees’ (a polite term for clueless authorized users) may defeat your first defenses and permit unauthorized access to important documents. However, document security can render the documents unusable.

The root reason for securing document files is to manage the trust of your trusted parties. Some employees may earn a lot of trust; some trading partners only a little. The InfraGard Manufacturing Industry Association (IMIA) has visited this theme in one of our very first articles, as well as more recent themes. They remain timely. You will find links at the end of this article.

These powerful ideas are coming our way, but they are new, and still a little rough. Now is the time to acquire a familiarity with the basics, and know where to look for more detail. Read on!

Editor

SECURING DIGITAL DOCUMENTS

Organizations are increasingly replacing their paper documents and forms with electronic versions for critical business transactions and communications. It is common practice to place purchase orders, file government reports, or distribute financial statements via the Web or e-mail.

Further, regulatory, legislative and standards bodies recognize the new business practices and the need for persistent document protection. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, SEC requirements, Gramm Leach Bliley Act, HIPAA, and the new ISO17999 standard contain demands satisfied by persistent document protection. (Many of these are addressed in past IMIA articles and training courses.)

This growing shift from paper to digital documents has raised new security concerns around these documents and the information they contain. How can you be sure that a document came from the person who supposedly sent it? How will you know if someone has changed the content without informing you? How can you prevent sensitive information from being distributed to unauthorized parties?

Without the proper precautions, organizations face serious risks to their financial performance, intellectual property, customer privacy, and more. With new tools, it is possible to create a security-enhanced environment that limits the number of possible avenues of attack.

Security is applied to digital documents to protect their authenticity, integrity, and confidentiality. There are two principal tools used to implement this protection: identity systems and document control.

Identity systems enable authors to authenticate the origin of documents they create. Document recipients can use identity systems to approve documents. Digital signatures are gaining ground as an identity system. Digital signature implementations often also provide ‘tamper-resistance’ that preserves the integrity of the content.

Document control applies access controls and permissions, so that only authorized people will be able to view, modify, or even print your documents.

Every form of digital document control is accomplished through establishing identity and granting permissions through a trusted authority that is usually the point of origin.

Identity – Permissions – Trusted Authority: important words. These concepts are at the root of many IMIA features and NCMS collaborative projects. There are a myriad of schemes for identity: tokens, biometrics, digital certificates, passwords and combinations of these, just to mention a few. There may be more than one trusted authority involved if your organization (a trusted authority) needs to identify an individual from another organization.

However, limiting access at the point of origin, for example, by placing files behind firewalls and granting access to those (perhaps encrypted) files to authorized individuals doesn’t prevent authorized users or recipients from subsequently redistributing or copying the documents once they have left the originator’s site, or after they have been decrypted on delivery.

Another approach is to encrypt the document and use a proprietary viewer to tie the decryption key to a particular computer. This means that the document can be used only on one computer and will be lost when that system is upgraded or fails.

A third approach is to make the document unchangeable, as in Adobe .pdf files. Sometimes this is just the right answer. Sometimes these systems inhibit rather than enable the business process.

There is a need to protect the digital document in a persistent way and to enforce your permissions. *Very importantly*, you want to be able to ‘change your mind’ and revoke permissions previously granted.

Of course, this rights-managed content collaboration would work best if we all used the same hardware and software.

Lower cost digital document control systems aimed at general industry and business are coming to the marketplace now. Adobe and Microsoft have two of the prominent offerings

Adobe’s Sealed Media approach separates rights from content. It seals conventional files within a layer of encryption and digital signatures. It keeps the rights in the possession of the originator on a networked license server. There are provisions for offline use and free downloadable plug-ins, as you might expect. Since the rights are separate from the content, then it is possible to associate more than one set of rights with the same document, and to associate more than one document with the same set of rights. This scheme also permits the owner to revoke rights. (This is not an Adobe ad. You can find more detail in the Resources Page.)

Microsoft is testing Information Rights Management (IRM) as a feature of Microsoft Office 2003. It enhances collaboration and restricts unauthorized access to the content of Microsoft Office Word 2003, Excel 2003, PowerPoint 2003, and Outlook 2003 files. IRM also links to Microsoft’s workflow, directory service, server, and identity products.

IRM is a persistent file-level technology from Microsoft that allows the user to specify permission for who can access and use documents or e-mail messages, and it helps to prevent sensitive information from being printed, forwarded, or copied by unauthorized individuals. Once permission for a document or message has been restricted with this technology, the usage restrictions travel with the document or e-mail message as part of the contents of the file. As a complement to the approach above there is an option to ‘require a connection’ to verify a user’s permission. (This is not a Microsoft ad either. Please read more in the Resources page.)

Conclusion

Securing digital documents helps enable the enforcement of existing corporate policies regarding document confidentiality, workflow, and e-mail retention. It also reduces the risk of having key company information in the hands of the wrong people, whether by accident, thoughtlessness, or through malicious intent.

The marketplace will soon test the pros and cons of these new general business capabilities, each with a different approach. The opportunity the end user is a solution with high value for cost; perhaps first in environments where regulation creates demand to do something. Now you can be prepared for the change.

LINKS

http://trust.ncms.org, select ‘Publications Index’ tab to find:
   August 2002 Mfg.Trust - Federated trust management systems for e-business
   November 2001 Mfg.Trust – Managing the Trust of the Trusted

NCMS Online Courses at http://training.ncms.org/index_shock.htm
   Information Security Management
   Integrating Security Across the Enterprise
   IT Security Components
   Managing Information Technology for Competitive Advantage
   Privacy in Concert with Government Regulations

If you liked Mfg.Trust, please forward it to a colleague in your company!

For questions, comments, or for NCMS Alliance Partners to request their own FREE subscription to Mfg.Trust, send email to johns@sheridansolutions.com

To unsubscribe, please send an email to listserv@listserv.ncms.org and insert the words "unsubscribe mfgtrust", without the quotes, in the BODY of the message. This is a moderated list.

ap
 

If you liked Mfg.Trust, please forward it to a colleague in your company!

For questions, comments, or for NCMS Alliance Partners to request their own FREE subscription to Mfg.Trust, send e-mail to johns@ncms.org