A framework to secure a document outside Its organization

Abstract

Electronic information in any enterprise is an asset, and may be stored in a database or as electronic documents (word, PDF, and spreadsheet). This research focuses on the information leakage caused by documents going astray. Current document security statistics suggest that 63% of information was leaked as documents in 2012. Half of this was due to employee unawareness, and it has cost billions in terms of Intellectual Property IP, effort and money. The problem is that individual documents are almost defenceless outside the enterprise. Encryption and password protection are not impenetrable; it is only a question of time before the information is extracted using intense computing processing power. This research contributes a new conceptual framework to secure a document, regardless of its place inside or outside the organisation. The framework combines the concepts of Active document, Digital Rights Management, Certificate Authorities, and content providers. The Tamper Proof Framework (TPF) will enable any document to be involved in decisions regarding the basic operations performed on it. Security experts and security-related IT staff confirmed these components. The research produced a general conceptual framework that can be used in different domains. Formal methods were used to produce an event-based conceptual formal model. This model is an intermediate step for many future research directions.

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ORCID for Gary Wills: orcid.org/0000-0001-5771-4088

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