Creating secured word "Viewers"

[anthony5279]

Has anyone built or came accross a way to share documents by creating a "viewer" type application.

Issue: We sell a tool that produces high value documents. We have automated a complex sales process: ROI to the point that a large sales force can get by with only one user liscense. I am attempting to account for all of the true users of the documents.

One solution would be to create a vba application that the user must sign into before opening the document. The sign in data gets validated against a web database server. The users must buy the viewer. We already have the technology in place to link the activated application to the cpu to prevent multiple users from sharing one sign on.

Any thoughts, examples, etc..??

 

[Word Heretic]

G'day "anthony5279" <[email protected]>,

<chuckles>

If you want a long, almost pointless discussion of the principles
involved in copyrijghting software I'll oblige, but I assure you will
will end up with the same ole problems:

Lockdown vs Usability
Anything a computer can read a computer can write
Etc

Steve Hudson - Word Heretic
Want a hyperlinked index? S/W R&D? See WordHeretic.com

steve from wordheretic.com (Email replies require payment)


anthony5279 reckoned:

 

[Jonathan West]

Forget about using Word as a secure editing or viewing environment. It isn't
designed for it. Every so often, somebody comes along here with a wizard
wheeze for securing documents, and on those occasions that they actually
provide a sanple document, then it has never taken me longer than a couple
of minutes to break the security.

Once the document leaves your own secure environment, you cannot control it.

You really need to use different technology for this instead of Word.

--
Regards
Jonathan West - Word MVP
www.intelligentdocuments.co.uk
Please reply to the newsgroup

Has anyone built or came accross a way to share documents by creating a "viewer" type application.

Issue: We sell a tool that produces high value documents. We have

automated a complex sales process: ROI to the point that a large sales force
can get by with only one user liscense. I am attempting to account for all
of the true users of the documents.

One solution would be to create a vba application that the user must sign

into before opening the document. The sign in data gets validated against a
web database server. The users must buy the viewer. We already have the
technology in place to link the activated application to the cpu to prevent
multiple users from sharing one sign on.

 

[Word Heretic]

G'day "Jonathan West" <[email protected]>,

If I send you a password locked VBA project, can you open it? My
current solution is to cypher the content and only allow decyphering
on a password being provided.

I scramble the code to make decompiling it harder, so it still boils
down to working out what bit of binary gloop does the decrypt and
running just that.

One of the problems with the test case I have implmented is that,
being a test case, there isnt much binary gloop to sort through which
if we using RSS or similar keys, wouldn't be so much a problem. I am
just using ROT13 for the sake of the exercise.

However, if you consider it easy to smash into protected VBA, then
this method starts to fall apart. The scrambler will slow you down a
lot, but hell, I used to manually decompile binary executables and
data files - no nice var names there but it never stopped me

Steve Hudson - A 6502 EA drifting in cyberspace

steve from wordheretic.com (Email replies require payment)


Jonathan West reckoned:

 

[Jonathan West]

G'day "Jonathan West" <[email protected]>,

If I send you a password locked VBA project, can you open it?

Yes, unfortunately. 5 seconds work. VBA passwords should not be regarded as
protection against anything more than casual curiosity.

My
current solution is to cypher the content and only allow decyphering
on a password being provided.

Once the password has been given, there's nothing to prevent the document
being saved under another name, or being copied & pasted into another
document without the protection and then distributed far & wide. So even the
fact that the VBA code is password protected isn't much help. In fact, none
of the protection schemes I've seen (including content encryption decrypted
by embedded VBA code) required me to break the VBA password.

 

[Word Heretic]

G'day "Jonathan West" <[email protected]>,

Yes, but no unauthorised folks can see / copy the document. That's all
you can really ask for...

Steve Hudson - Word Heretic
Want a hyperlinked index? S/W R&D? See WordHeretic.com

steve from wordheretic.com (Email replies require payment)


Jonathan West reckoned:

 

[Jonathan West]

That assumes that your protection can't be broken without the password.
Unless you have thought of a way radically different from anything else that
has been tried, then I suspect I can break the document withiout too much
trouble. Would you care to email me a sample? I'll email it back to you with
protection removed if I can, and post the results back here (though not the
actual document.