Jun 15 2009
Confidela – Bringing Cloud Based Document Security to Semiconductor IP
The semiconductor industry and other IP oriented businesses have to transmit confidential documents to both members of the company when they are in remote locations and to third parties (customers, partners and vendors). This correspondence with confidential value includes price quotes, RFP responses, roadmaps, specifications, competitive analysis, product design options, and business plans, The primary method is through the marking of the document as confidential on the document and then distributing it normally. This normal distribution includes email attachments of the actual document in standard business format (ppt, doc, xls, pdf, etc).
The difficulty with this approach, especially if you are dealing with early release information or raw information is, control of the document after distribution. Confidela has developed a web based application (in its current form free to use at http://www.confidela.com ) called Watchdox. The product is targeted for several applications including the secure handling of presentations, data and quotes/documents relating to IP and products in the semiconductor industry. The key aspects of the product are the encryption of the document, the ability to validate the recipient of the documents and restrict their ability to forward, print, copy or view the document. The view restrictions are currently in the form of expiration time for document access and a second level of security which visually masks the document on the screen with the exception of a “spotlight” window magnifier which revels portions of the screen selectively with the cursor so he content can be read but not screen or photo captured. The documents under this system can be protected with a watermark in case the print fucntion is enabled.
Unlike the current method where the physical document resides at the recipients site and necessarily their backup environment, the Watchdox system uses a cloud based encryption and data storage model. In this method, all of the documents being sent in a secure manner reside at a safe third party location with only the notification email directly being sent and residing on the recipient platform. The product works as a thin client app on most hardware if Outlook integration is desired, otherwise there is no installation on the either the sending or receiving platform.. The product is very well adopted to the various use models of the corporate community as it is a single step authentication over a browser.
The tracking history of the document and the reader is currently supported, and future releases will support a full administrator console for complete and complex policy monitoring. The initial web release supports 16 file type under their encryption model. They have a roadmap to add associated encryption and tracking of attached data files that are in archive or compressed format, but they are NOT planning to embed encryption inside of the compression step for the attached files. The WatchDox system is available for use right now at www.watchdox.com.
PC