Friday, May 17, 2013

Put A Strong Lock On Your PDF File Information

As you work to implement protect PDF file measures, information thieves work to come up with more innovative ways to break your protection.  The solution is to contact a Document Rights Management (DRM) provider, and create the most secure lock for your data as you can.

Some of the measures a provider implements for PDF document security will address the common methods of unauthorized information access.  These include allowing users to save sensitive documents to their computer, or to forward them in their emails.  It also stops users from printing out the documents and disseminating the paper copies.  It even prevents screen captures of the proprietary documents.

However, many of the measures taken by a professional DRM company to provide protect PDF file strategies are not dreamed of by the common user.  For instance, the best DRM providers will not use plug-ins.  Although providing protection service with a plug-in is a standard way of providing a general service, it does not provide the level of validation required by a strong DRM strategy.

Another common way to protect information transfer is to create access controls using the most common Internet browser scripting language available: JavaScript.  However, JavaScript is not a secure implementation, and is vulnerable to malicious software that can copy or even alter the content of PDF documents.  The best DRM providers do not use JavaScript.

Another way that information hackers access controlled information is to go to the temporary documents storage location.  Depending on the browser and settings, every document a user views is stored to a temporary location, whether they manually save the document or not.  Some of the reasons it does this is to preclude having to save a large document in limited dynamic memory.  It will also have a cached copy of the document that allows the user a second view without downloading the file a second time.  Unfortunately, the location of these documents is not well hidden, and thieves can bypass the original document and simply access the temporary documents.  Top-level DRM firms will not use temporary documents either.

One display method that was effective for a long time was to use Flash to provide PDF document security.  However, even this method was broken years ago, and your DRM provider will not use Flash either.

These are just some of the design constraints a DRM company addresses.  After reading this, many are surprised at how vulnerable their sensitive information actually is.  However, they can see that their documents are in good hands, and that, as fast as the information thieves come up with new strategies, their DRM solution provider is there to stop them.

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