Intellectual Property Protection Tools

Protecting intellectual property (IP) and confidential information is important and challenging.

May 01, 2005 — CSO — Protecting intellectual property (IP) and confidential information is important and challenging. Proprietary information—financial data, health-care information and the like—flows back and forth from organization to organization as an integral part of business. Increasingly, companies need to share information with third parties that are physically or culturally distant. As a result, the traditional oversight and controls used to secure sensitive intellectual property no longer make the grade. When these groups share information and expose their IP through unmanaged technologies, such as USB drives and Web-based e-mail, the risk of loss or unauthorized use is multiplied. We first explored IP security in this column in October 2003 but there are new developments to report. Here is a list of companies that are pioneering systems designed to keep sensitive information where it belongs.

Adobe www.adobe.com

Adobe Document Services allow users to manage access to confidential documents, control what specific users can do with those documents, track what has been done since the documents were created, and verify the authenticity of the document. Adobe LiveCycle Document Security software encrypts and digitally signs PDF files automatically, saving organizations the time it takes to manually open a file and add protections. LiveCycle users can validate authenticity and integrity of PDF content by verifying document signatures against digital certificates.

Tablus www.tablus.com

Tablus's information security solution, deemed Content Alarm, identifies, audits and prevents unauthorized or unintended disclosures of confidential information. It monitors all outgoing traffic at the network perimeter and identifies sensitive content leaving the network in e-mail or e-mail attachments, HTTP posts, FTP transmissions and other traffic protocols. Content Alarm allows for multiple classifications of data types for better detection of sensitive information, and it also lets users assign labels to different types of data (for example, human resources, financial, R&D and so on), making it easier for companies to monitor network activity.

SealedMedia www.sealedmedia.com

A provider of enterprise document and e-mail security solutions, SealedMedia's system consists of three software components: the Sealer, the License Server and the Unsealer. The author first creates a confidential document and then secures it using the Sealer. Access rights are assigned to authorized users by the creator and are stored on the License Server. Those access rights can be modified at any time. For a user to access the document, he must download the Unsealer. Provided the user is authorized, the Unsealer opens the file and allows the user access. The License Server tracks document access and then provides an audit log to document regulation compliance.