Securely sharing Government data

  Using Safeguard PDF Security to protect data & facilitate secure document sharing

Government departments and agencies need to be able to control the access to and distribution of information which they hold at different levels of confidentiality, and which they must distribute to many different people.

At one level it is enough that a document can be authenticated by the recipient as being from government and cannot be altered or misrepresented.

At another level information is usually for distribution to specific groups or levels of officers, and not for distribution outside that.  At a further level, information is for distribution to specific individuals and nobody else.

In the ordinary course of events, documents coming in these categories have markings to show who is entitled to use them (protectively marked).  Coming from a paper world, the markings are usually stamped on the physical documents.  And although we have now moved to the digital era, the markings need to be translated into controls that prevent onwards distribution of controlled information, a requirement that was ably demonstrated by Edward Snowden who redistributed uncontrolled copies of quite a lot of secret documents.

Another area where government requires better documentary control is the publishing of documents with redactions (sections blacked out because the information is sensitive).  By publishing documents that can be processed with normal software, hackers have been able to re-process the documents and remove redactions, removing the value of the redaction in the first place by highlighting what was removed as being sensitive.  Locklizard PDF DRM software however prevents this.

Locklizard provide a DRM system for preventing people from being able to read documents forwarded to them without authorization.  Government departments can securely exchange documents in different environments without the need to implement a specific infrastructure.  Documents can be locked to specific devices, countries, and IP addresses or range of IPs so that they cannot be used outside certain environments and/or locations.  Locklizard PDF DRM software also logs document use so you can see who viewed/printed your documents, where and when.  And dynamic watermarks can be applied to viewed/printed documents so you can identify leaks if a photo or photocopy is made.

Locklizard provides its own free PDF Viewers which provide a stable PDF rendering platform to insulate users from security issues that PDF applications frequently introduce when adding new features or fixing bugs.  There are also two zero installation Viewers (users can access documents without installing anything on their device) – a Web Viewer for viewing protected PDF documents online, and a USB Viewer for offline use.

Locklizard methods follow the guidance of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for encryption appropriate for cost effective security to secure government documents.  Encryption technology is used to protect documents at rest and information in transit.  Locklizard are not authorized to include military algorithms, so our products would not be appropriate for very high levels of security, but could prove very valuable in addressing levels such as commercial in confidence, where the RSA and AES algorithms are approved for use.