[lug] securing files

[Peter Hutnick]

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On Monday 22 April 2002 04:03 pm, Hugh Brown wrote:
> I have some files that were acquired under agreement that they be
> completely confidential, only accessed by people on the project, and
> never transported unless encrypted.
>
> Right now they are on an NFS share.  I'd like to make it so that the
> files can't be copied anywhere but can still be read by the appropriate
> people.

Well, if you let people read them you can't really stop them from copying 
them.  You may notice that there is no "copy" permission in UNIX.  Read == 
copy.

That really is a loosing battle (as the record and movie companies can tell 
you).  You could do a custom reader, that renders the files as graphics that 
are designed to be hard to OCR, but you can't stop transcription of something 
that someone can read.

You /could/ use PGP file encryption and encrypt with the public keys of only 
the folks authorized to read them.  That won't stop them from decrypting them 
and emailing them to an unauthorized person.


- -Peter

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