Xerox developing new document encryption technology
Dennis Fisher, SearchSecurity.com, October 16, 2007
Excerpts from the article:
...known as intelligent redaction, which enables users to selectively encrypt different portions of a given document for different recipients. The software is able to take into account the context of words or phrases in a document and determine when to redact the content and when to let it go.
The new technology could be a savior for financial services companies, health care providers and other organizations that must deal with confidential information on a mass scale. Employees in these organizations often face situations in which they're forced to either severely restrict the circulation of certain information or redact large amounts of it in order to comply with the lowest common denominator of access privileges. A tool such as intelligent redaction could allow for wider distribution of information with higher security at the same time...
"There is some natural language processing in there, but humans are very much in the loop," said Jessica Staddon, the area manager of the security and privacy research group at Xerox's famed Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), which is leading the development of the new software. "I can write a rule and the apply it and see the effects of it and have the ability to tune it. You can apply rules at the word level or even at the sentence or paragraph levels."
In the process of developing the software, the PARC researchers went out and talked to potential users in a number of different fields, including lawyers, medical records clerks and others. What they found was that people handle the redaction process in different ways, depending upon their roles and the kind of information in question.
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