secure document sharing

Secure Document Sharing

Secure Document Sharing – securely share documents & control PDF use

Protect IP

Securely share documents – control use regardless of location:

Stop unauthorized access
Stop sharing and distribution
Strong US Gov strength encryption, DRM and licensing controls

Restrict Use

Set Expiry

Revoke Access

Watermark

Log Use

Comply Law

Benefits

Using Document DRM to ensure secure document sharing

In any organization there is a need to be able to share information across departments, across functions, with resellers and agents, and even with competitors and third parties such as legal advisers. But the decision about who gets to ‘share’ information remains with the owner, the corporate body, and not with the recipients.

The need to share documents securely requires a very flexible series of DRM controls to support the differing scenarios the organization must be able to support. Apart from being able to restrict the users who can open a secured document to stop them from being able to pass it on, you may need to restrict the location(s) it can be used in, or you may wish to prevent it from being printed or used after a specific date. Some users may be allowed to use documents whilst connected to the internal network only.

This is the essential difference between ‘collaboration’ and ‘sharing.’ In collaboration control of document content may be devolved, even to the point where recipients can choose who else may use (and change) secured documents. In sharing, document content is available to authorised recipients to use, but not to edit, distribute or re-distribute.

In sharing documents securely, decisions have to be made about who may receive which documents, and where they may use them, and for how long. It is less usual to allow shared documents to be printed out or otherwise copied.

Stopping documents being shared
With password based systems such as Adobe PDF password protection users can share both documents and passwords with others. So PDF password protection does not ensure secure document sharing since it cannot prevent documents from being shared with unauthorized users.

Locklizard use public key technology with a secure and secret key transfer mechanism so that keys are never exposed to users and interfaces where they can be readily exposed. Document keys are locked to authorized devices within a keystore, so if the keystore is copied to another device it will fail to work. This security mechanism stops users sharing protected documents with others.
Controlling expiry
Ensuring that documents expire after a certain period of time or use can be an important part of secure document sharing and limiting document use. Controlled documents can have fixed end dates so they stop being available automatically – so stopping access to them does not have to be administered manually.

Locklizard enable you to set documents to automatically expire:
- on a fixed date
- after a number of days use
- after a number of views
- after a number of prints
So you have full control over how long your protected documents can be viewed and printed.
Controlling or stopping printing
Generally where controlled shared documents are searchable there is no requirement to allow paper copies to be made and by default printing is disabled. However, if you want users to be able to make printed copies then you can:
1. limit the number of high quality prints allowed
2. log each time a document is print (so you can see when and where your protected documents were printed)
3. watermark printed content with user identifiable information (using dynamic watermarks that insert user and system information at print time) to discourage photocopying and subsequent distribution
Locklizard automatically prevent printing to file drivers so that users cannot print to PDF and other digital document formats.
Restricting document use to locations
The introduction of personal tablets (BYOD) into the work place has required a change to controls to make sure that documents that can be used in the workplace cannot be used from other locations, although they must continue to be available from the right location(s).

Locklizard protected PDF documents are able to implement controls such as country locations and the range of IP addresses that they may be used on, allowing shared documents to be restricted to corporate networks, as well as requiring the validity of the license to be checked with each use. You can restrict location access on a global and user basis enabling tight control over secure document sharing with third parties.
Logging use
There may be occasions when you want to see if a document you have distributed has been viewed and/or printed, and where, when and how often this occurred.

Locklizard enables you to log document use so you can identify any suspicious activity and instantly revoke access if required.
Revoking access
There are going to be times when you have distributed documents that are no longer valid, users have left a company, or contracts with third parties are no longer active. On these occasions both documents and users will need to be revoked so that document access is no longer possible.

Locklizard enable you to instantly revoke access to documents for all or individual users, or revoke user access to all or individual documents in one go.

Why Access Rights & Encryption cannot Prevent Document Sharing

Access rights were an important development in the mainframe computer era. Access rights started by preventing you writing to a magnetic tape, and improved to reserving the type of access rights you had. But if you had read access you could make a copy of the file. So access rights did not go very far to prevent document sharing.

So to prevent document sharing you need to do something extra. DRM controls have to be something different from document access rights.

Some people try to prevent document sharing by using document encryption. Document encryption is a valuable technique because it prevents document sharing if you do not have the decryption key. If you look at document encryption software (look at the ArticSoft or the PGP web sites as examples) what they do is take a document and encrypt it. That’s it! There is nothing about stopping valid recipients from copying, document sharing, printing and so on. So anyone who can decrypt the document can share it (and also alter it, perhaps without detection). So although document encryption software can restrict who can use documents (although there is nothing to prevent people from sharing document encryption keys, and therefore document sharing) it does nothing to prevent document sharing.

Document DRM combines encryption, DRM and licensing controls, together with additional OS controls (such as preventing screen grabbing) that work to prevent document sharing or reduce the desire of users to allow document sharing for documents they are linked to. Personalising document rights with watermarking on viewed or printed images encourages users to avoid document sharing for photographed or printed material. Restricting the number of times documents can be printed or seen is an improvement over access rights, because it is not an all or nothing control. Document rights are absolute, but DRM controls can be variable, granular and changeable to suit the rights a publisher wishes to grant.

Secure Document Sharing in the Cloud

The introduction of ‘the cloud’ as part of the Internet of things is a recent re-invention of developments by companies such as Tymshare in the 1970’s who introduced networked file and system sharing in an environment that would later be called collaboration.

Locklizard support the cloud access approach to secure PDF documents by providing web based access using the normal browser interface – Safeguard Web Viewer – so it no longer matters where the user is or the device that they are using. So publishers are able to extend accessibility to their users by publishing their documents to the web and users viewing them via a browser rather than users installing a Viewer on their device.

This does not mean there is a compromise in the security of documents accessed through the browser. Protected documents are passed, encrypted, to the browser in ‘chunks’ of 2 or 3 pages and not the whole document in one go. This makes it more difficult to collect all the pages if someone is attempting to subvert the browser. Further, only one logged user can use the account at a time, so if a user has had their account compromised (or possibly given the access details away) they will not be able to use their account whenever someone else is using it – which may encourage them to report incidents.

Web portal documents enable a more flexible method of secure document sharing (works on any device with a browser) and support all the usual DRM controls supported by Locklizard, including document expiry, logging and watermarking. Safeguard Web Viewer can be run on your own intranet as well as begin outside facing as a publicly accessible web site.

Secure Document Sharing via USB sticks

Sometimes there will be a requirement to share documents securely in a meeting or at an event. This is a typical requirement for paper documents. But what if you could securely share digital documents instantly instead?

Locklizard enable you to publish your protected documents to a USB device along with a protected keystore and a secure Viewer. Basically all the components required for users to open them. USB devices can then be distributed like paper documents but with additional controls such as expiry, individual user watermarking and location locking.

Safeguard Portable can be used as a completely offline solution (no Internet access ever required), and since secure documents are locked to USB sticks rather than to specific computers they can be used anywhere.

Why Locklizard for Secure Document Sharing?

Securely share documents without passwords

Locklizard takes your document protection seriously. We provide total PDF protection with US Gov strength AES 256 bit encryption and public key technology to ensure your PDF files remain protected no matter where they reside.

Our DRM PDF Security products enable you to share documents securely without insecure passwords or plug-ins, and enforce access, location, expiry, and usage controls.
Unlike Adobe Permissions which can be easily removed, our DRM controls persistently protect your PDF files and enable you to revoke PDFs at any time regardless of where they are.
No keys are exposed to users or interfaces and documents are only ever decrypted in memory – see our DRM technology.
Our easy to use adminsitration system provides simple user and document management and unlike passwords, keys are transparently and securely managed for you.

See our customer testimonials or read our case studies to see why thousands of organizations use Locklizard PDF security to securely share and sell their documents.

Customer Testimonials

	Regulatory Compliance
	Compliance Requirements
	Secure Document Sharing
	Document Leakage
	Internal Document Control
	Document Retention
	Our DRM Technology
	DRM Business Benefits