Secure dissemination of information?

[Fat Tone]

Say you've got a Word document, the content of which you wish to share with a bunch of people in a company, but you can't risk them copying the text and redistributing it... Short of standing over them with an axe while they read a printed copy how would you do it?

[Brian Ellis]

Will this help:

Restrict permission to confidential information in Office files
This article explains how you can restrict permission to content in documents, workbooks, and presentations by using Information Rights Management (IRM), which is available in the 2007 Microsoft Office system. For information on how you can restrict permission to content in e-mail messages, see Restrict permission to confidential information in e-mail messages.

For information on how to set a password to open or modify a file, see Set a password to open or modify a document, workbook, or presentation. There are other articles that describe using passwords to protect formatting in documents and protect worksheet or workbook elements.

In this article

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The purpose of IRM and its limitations

Configure your computer to use IRM

Download permissions

Restrict permission to content in files

Use a different Windows user account to rights-manage files

View content with restricted permission


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The purpose of IRM and its limitations
Information Rights Management (IRM) allows individuals and administrators to specify access permissions to documents, workbooks, and presentations. This helps prevent sensitive information from being printed, forwarded, or copied by unauthorized people. After permission for a file has been restricted by using IRM, the access and usage restrictions are enforced no matter where the information is, because the permission to a file is stored in the document file itself.

IRM helps individuals enforce their personal preferences concerning the transmission of personal or private information. IRM also helps organizations enforce corporate policy governing the control and dissemination of confidential or proprietary information.

IRM helps to do the following:
Prevent an authorized recipient of restricted content from forwarding, copying, modifying, printing, faxing, or pasting the content for unauthorized use
Prevent restricted content from being copied by using the Print Screen feature in Microsoft Windows
Restrict content wherever it is sent
Support file expiration so that content in documents can no longer be viewed after a specified period of time
Enforce corporate policies that govern the use and dissemination of content within the company
IRM can't prevent the following:
Content from being erased, stolen, or captured and transmitted by malicious programs such as Trojan horses, keystroke loggers, and certain types of spyware
Content from being lost or corrupted because of the actions of computer viruses
Restricted content from being hand-copied or retyped from a display on a recipient's screen
A recipient from taking a digital photograph of the restricted content displayed on a screen
Restricted content from being copied by using third-party screen-capture programs

[az]

PDF probably has options for this. There are no-print options and I think there is also the option of not allowing text to be selected. Of course, this is all hackable, and as a last resort, people could just do screenshots or retype the stuff.

[ZokesPro]

Read it to them. Your the only one with a copy or let them read your copy and take it back. Hard copy of course, otherwise, it's like az said, it's always hackable.

[Dr Mordrid]

No print/No select is worthless. All they have to do is hit PRTSCN to copy the screen into the clipboard as a graphic, piecemeal if necessary, then put it together in a graphics tool.

[Brian Ellis]

No print/No select is worthless. All they have to do is hit PRTSCN to copy the screen into the clipboard as a graphic, piecemeal if necessary, then put it together in a graphics tool.

If you read what I posted, you will see this is not possible with IRM

Prevent an authorized recipient of restricted content from forwarding, copying, modifying, printing, faxing, or pasting the content for unauthorized use
Prevent restricted content from being copied by using the Print Screen feature in Microsoft Windows
Restrict content wherever it is sent

[Dr Mordrid]

And if you have a screen capture tool with programmable hot keys, making prediction impossible? I've found very few "protected" contents that really are if they are displayed to the screen.

[NetSnake]

there is now way to prevent someone (who is not supervised) from making copies if they really want to. one example: take pictures with a cell phone or other small camera...

edit: there is NO way (duh!)

[NetSnake]

this thread reminds me of "inspector gadget" cartoon

[Evildead666]

I agree that there is probably the only choice of having a single, hardcopy of the document.
It must never leave your eyesight though, either.

[Claymonkey]

Again I agree with everyone that giving people a document but not wanting them to be able to do what they want with is a losing battle at best.

However, your first best option is an uneditable pdf. If you don't have acrobat there are tons of pdf tools out there for free such as cutepdf.

If you have to have it as a word document. I'd recommend converting the text into an image file (multi-page tiff's are the best best if it's a long document). and then having those inside the word document.

Either way there is nothing stopping them from putting either document through an OCR program. Or just giving someone else the file.

[Fluff]

How about

http://www.g7ps.com/scripts/versainkuv.asp?_pre_=172

Invisible ink cartridge Sweet

[cjolley]

PDFs are very useful as long as you aren't interested in "features".

There are lots of these: http://www.verypdf.com/pwdremover/pdf-cracker.htm

[Fluff]

Ring a legal firm. Get them to do the leg work. And sign a NDA.

[MultimediaMan]

We do it all the time; check out what with Citrix Clients can do.

We run this sort of security at some high-level meetings;

1) Permissions and User rights are setup to where even admins cannot see the contents of the document.

2) You control access to the room, and only allow people to use a Thin Client running Citrix to view it during the duration of the meeting.

3) The layout of the meeting prevents anyone from taking a cell-phone camera shot. (Security actually puts everyone past a CCD lense aperture detector, discreetly,)