How Do You Monitor Documents?

JumpDrive writes "I have been presented with a problem recently, which I know others have probably faced. During the last month, one of our customers accused us of providing another customer with their specification. So the question arose: how do we, or can we trace documents and find if they are being opened or used somewhere where they weren't intended. We don't want to be restrictive, because at times, we have people all over the place, but if one of our documents were opened in a foreign country, that would arouse suspicions. Most of our documents are made with MS office suite, and I have been thinking of working on a macro to ping a server, but that would require the user to enable the macros, and it would also require the insertion into about 1000 documents. But it's been difficult for me to find a solution that doesn't prevent someone in Omaha from opening a document for legitimate use and is not a solution that can easily be disabled or hacked around."

Comments

Microsoft Rights Management Server?

[Richard_at_work]

See topic - MS do something which seems to be essentially *exactly* what you want, and since you are using MS Office, I would suggest giving it a try.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/rightsmgmt/default.mspx

Re:Microsoft Rights Management Server?

[(H)elix1]

As does Oracle

Oracle Information Rights Management

As does EMC, and a few others... Do shop around, as there are several products out there that can 'tether' assets - not just Microsoft Office documents too.

Active Directory Rights Management Services

[lukas84]

The best solution to your problem probably would be using Microsoft's AD RMS.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753531.aspx

AD RMS provides you with the ability to control licensing, opening, printing, etc. of documents. This will provide you with the audit trail you migh tneed.

Of course, you can still photograph every screen while scrolling through the pages, so it's essentially worthless in practice, but it might satisfy your customers demands for proper paperworks.

Yep, implementing AD RMS will be a heck a lot of work, and you'll surely need to adjust your internal processes in order to incorporate AD RMS.

What you're planning on doing is DRM: Which is, as all Slashdot readers know, impossible with a properly determined person. And in your case (industrial espionage), there are better people working on it than a few hackers that try cracking Blue-Ray in their spare time.

What's the real problem here?

[buss_error]

OK, you've gone for a tech solution to a problem before really asking what the problem here is. So what's the real problem? Legal libility, of course. Your customer X is accusing you of sharing data with their competition Y.

Create an job to track sensitive documents. If you only have a few, then it would be additional duties for someone. If you have a lot, it's a new position. This job is to track who has legitimate access to sensitive documents. When customer X starts throwing allogations you've shared data with customer Y, everyone that has legitimate access to the data is required to sign an affidavit that they did not share the data with people not autorized to have the info. Now customer X has to PROVE that one of your employee's did indeed do so, and that their affidavit is a lie. MUCH harder to prove and a lot cheaper for your company to defend against.

Of course, that won't stop customer X from THINKING you did, and that may cost you that customer, but absent using a full up sensitive document control system like the government does, there's no real inexpensive solution I've found. I'd be interested to see if /. comes up with one though.

Other Options

[Anonymous Coward]

EMC IRM (Formerly Authentica (yes, there is a typo in the summary))

Oracle IRM (Formerly SealedMedia)

Liquid Machines

Adobe LifeCycle Rights Management

Not exactly

[DrYak]

DRM is snake oil

DRM is snake oil in the way it's used to protect media from copy.
Because at the same time DRM is supposed to enable one to show the content (and thus give the key to the individual holding a copy) and exactly at the same time its supposed to stop unlicensed copies (thus preventing the exact same person using the exact same keys to copy the exact same media in a different way).
It's snake oil, because in the classical cryptographic triangle - A(lice) sending a crypted message to B(ob) without C(harles) snooping it - DRM makes B and C the exact same person.
Hence the contradiction, and hence DRM is doomed to eternally fail to protect media, no matter how contrived means are applied to it.

Here the reader ask a completely different question :
he wants A to be in the headquater, B to be an employee in Omaha, and C is some person doing industrial spying in Russia or China.

Some people are supposed to have the cryptographic keys to the documents, other people aren't supposed to have the keys.

In that circumstance, cryptography might help...

(Well, that's assuming that the thieve is an external person. Of course if that was an inside job, we're back at a situation that movies are in. But then the company has a much bigger problem of trust toward its employee to tackle first).

MS claims to do something which seems to be essentially *exactly* what you want

Well, the real problem is at the beginning of the sentence :

MS do something which seems to be essentially *exactly* what you want

Given their long history in term of computer security, you can count on MS to completely botch their solution...