Overview

Business-critical information and intellectual property stored in standard enterprise file servers are vulnerable to insider attacks. Information theft by insiders is considered the most damaging threat in terms of potential financial loss. Moreover, it is difficult to detect and prevent insider theft of confidential information because in many cases the attacker had the proper authority to access the stolen information. Most existing solutions to the information theft problem are based on either sophisticated access control mechanisms or Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies, both of which have serious limitations in portability and effectiveness. In general, it is difficult to unify application-specific access control mechanisms into a uniform protection infrastructure that are applicable ; to a wide variety of file types. Moreover, they are unable to stop information theft by authorized users because there is simply no access control violation when confidential information is stolen. Display-Only File Server (DOFS ) is the first secure file server that addresses the information theft problem by decoupling "display access" from other types of file access and guaranteeing that even authorized insiders cannot have access to the bits of confidential files. Moreover, DOFS is able to thwart most information theft attacks without being disruptive to the end users or requiring significant changes to the existing IT infrastructure.

Owing to the transparent remote execution architecture and the tamper-resistant file protection mechanism, DOFS is able to protect an enterprise against information leakage by authorized insiders, regardless of whether the leakage is an accidental mistake or a malicious attack.