A Security Architecture for Enterprise Rights Management

Abstract

Securing electronic business documents is an increasing necessity nowadays. Enterprise Rights Management (ERM) is a comparatively new technical approach aimed at enforcing access and usage rights policies to sensitive electronic documents throughout their lifecycles within and across organizations [YuCh05]. While ERM systems in the market are increasingly deployed in today’s enterprises, they still lack fundamental security properties. One important security weakness is the ERM client software running on the end-user’s machine [TuCh04]. Users can always circumvent the rights enforcement by running exploits and manipulating their operating system or particular components of the ERM client application, thereby obtaining an unprotected copy of the document’s content [SeSt06, ReCa05]. In this paper, we emphasize this particular security weakness, and propose a security infrastructure based on Trusted Computing technology that can thwart most possible attacks on an ERM client, preventing therefore any circumvention of the policy enforcement over the document.