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Guides:
Intellectual
Property
Security
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technical
This page considers technological measures as a complement
to or substitute for protection under intellectual property
and other law.
It covers -
It
complements discussion of cryptography,
data loss and other matters
elsewhere on this site.
introduction
As preceding pages have noted, organisations and individuals
have relied on a range of law to protect official or commercial
secrecy and personal privacy. It is important to recognise
that law in isolation may offer inadequate protection,
whether through prohibition on unauthorised disclosure
and communication of information or as a deterrent against
such disclosure.
May owners and custodians of sensitive information accordingly
supplement legal protection through technological measures
or use such measures as an alternative to law, on the
basis for example that -
- resort
to the courts is too expensive and too slow or that
it is concerned with redress for injury rather than
prevention
- notions
of responsibility and negligence require owners/custodians
to have demonstrated some effort to have inhibited unautorised
access to (and dissemination of) sensitive information
- measures
may provide a basis for forensic identification of those
responsible for breaches of secrecy and the mechanisms
through which breaches occurred.
In
essence there are four measures for preserving secrets
-
- keeping
secrets in boxes
- marking
those secrets
- seeking
to inhibit use outside the box
- destroying
secrets
boxes
Sensitive information has traditionally been kept in physical
'boxes', ie housed in containers, rooms, buildings and
precincts to which only authorised people supposedly had
access. As information has gone line we have seen the
emergence of electronic boxes, including password restrictions
on access to devices/networks (or merely to particular
data), and use of mechanisms such as cryptography and
steganography (attempt to render information unintelligible
or undetectable by those without the requisite authorisation).
Inhibiting access to records or to locations from which
information can be accessed is so routine as to be invisible
in many circumstances. Officials, businesses and consumers
assume that some classes of information will be housed
in filing cabinets in rooms (or buildings) to which there
is no public access and that the entity responsible for
management of the information will take appropriate steps
to ensure that only authorised personnel within an organisation
will have access to those 'boxes'.
In reality the physical security surrounding much sensitive
information is weak. That is partly because of considerations
of cost and risk, highlighted below. It is also partly
because of questions of trust and authority. Building
walls and polishing locks is inadequate if the wrong people
get the keys - one reason why vetting
mechanisms, pretexting
and identity crime are
of concern.
marking
Documents (and more broadly information) can be 'marked'
in order to alert organisations and individuals to the
sensitive status of material, to deter illicit copying/dissemination
and/or to provide a basis for prosecution when unauthorised
release of secrets occurs.
That marking may be overt, for example through stamps
and other labelling of folders, disks, tapes, file covers,
document containers such as filing cabinets and even individual
pages of a document. The status of a document may be marked
through inclusion of information within a text (for example
a reference to a document being provided on a commercial
in confidence basis to specified recipients for particular
purposes only) or through onscreen warnings when a user
- authorised or otherwise - accesses information online.
The marking may instead be covert. Past and contemprary
marking strategies have included identification numbers
or other 'signatures' in an ink that is only visible under
ultraviolet light or when treated with a particular reagent,
RFID tags, watermarking,
editioning (each copy has a slightly different wording)
and differential spacing (a copy is identifiable because
line/word spacing is unique).
crippling
Institutions have adopted a variety of technological strategies
to inhibit unauthorised reproduction and communication
of documents.
Those strategies include -
- use
of paper that fluoresces or otherwise spoils reproduction
with a photocopier
- PDFS
that are readable onscreen but will not print or copy.
Such
strategies may be used to preserve the integrity of particular
documents, as discussed here.
destruction and withdrawal
Tyrants have typically murdered opponents and subordinates
on the basis that dead men tell no tales. That practice
reflects recognition that one way to preserve secrets
is to destroy the paper or other media that embody the
information.
Destroying a single folio, letter, report or book may
be simple. Effective and rapid destruction of large amounts
of information, particularly in non-digital formats, may
be more challenging. Elsewhere on this site we have highlighted
demand for shredders - increasingly being marketed to
residential consumers as a tool for impeding identity
theft - and incidents such as where Iranian carpet
weavers spent several years reconstructing shredded documents
found in the US embassy after seizure of that facility.
In practice few organisations spend much effort trying
to piece together strips of paper (an effort easily defeated
by using a confetti shredder). A more serious concern
is the laxit of individuals and organisations who have
assumed that it is easy to permanently erase a hard disk
or - as highlighted here
- have failed to wipe a disk/device before dumping it
or selling it. True security involves physical destruction
of the disk, not merely waving a magnet in the right direction.
The US government and its peers have on occasion sought
to withdraw information from the public sphere, for example
deleting documents from websites and withdrawing critical
infrastructure reports from libraries. Retrospective identification
of 'public' information as secret appears to be rarely
effective, requiring diligence in removal and a commitment
on the part of people who have encountered that information
to forget about it. Dutiful readers of Soviet encyclopaedias
during the Stalin years may have obeyed the injuction
to delete offending articles and insert replacement pages
but few people follow that example.
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