Adobe Strengthens Electronic Document Security With Adobe Acrobat 6.0

~ enterprise security technology in Acrobat 6.0 highlighted at RSA conference in San Francisco ~

Adobe Systems, the leader in network publishing, is advancing security for electronic documents with its recent release of the Adobe Acrobat product family and Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). With capabilities for digital signatures and document control, Acrobat 6.0 software and PDF will empower organisations to build document integration solutions for communicating business-critical information to broad audiences, with greater security than ever before. “The proliferation of electronic documents continues to complicate the issues associated with personal privacy, protection of intellectual property, and ownership,” said Charles Kolodgy, research director at IDC.

“Organisations need to assign a higher priority to ensuring the integrity of sensitive documents by incorporating stronger document control mechanisms such as digital signing. Additionally, electronic documents that contain sensitive information, especially protected personal privacy information, must only be accessed by authorised persons. With the increasingly punitive nature of the rising regulatory environment, failure to meet these needs can have significant consequences.” This week, Adobe and its partners will be demonstrating security advancements in digital signatures and document control with Acrobat 6.0 during the RSA conference on electronic data security in San Francisco. The company will highlight how Acrobat 6.0 provides document authors and recipients with easy access to security features within a document. This helps organisations take full advantage of more secure, reliable electronic document exchange within the enterprise and externally to business partners and customers.

Acrobat 6.0 now supports author and recipient signatures to provide additional assurances of an electronic document’s origin and integrity. Authors can use the new “Save as Certified Document” option to digitally sign documents sent to broad audiences, such as press releases or analyst reports. Recipients using Acrobat or the free Adobe Reader software can now easily verify the author’s Certified Document signature without any additional security software. This confirms that the document did originate from the named party and that it was not tampered with since authoring. With Acrobat 6.0 and the free Adobe Reader, recipients also can apply a digital signature to acknowledge or approve information they have received and/or are supplying back to the author.

This is especially useful for electronic forms. With just the free Adobe Reader (and a PDF form with rights enabled by Adobe Document Server for Reader Extensions), recipients can fill in a form online or offline, digitally sign it, and send it back. To support best practices, Certified Documents and recipient signatures can be used together in round-trip workflows to establish a complete auditable document trail. Final recipients of a form can verify the authenticity and integrity of the original form and all information supplied in the workflow.

Adobe has expanded document control in Acrobat 6.0 to help enterprises manage privacy and intellectual property by protecting the confidentiality of documents and electronic forms. In addition to password protection, Acrobat now natively supports the ability to encrypt a document using Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).

These new encryption capabilities enable authors to simply type in recipients’ names or email addresses and automatically encrypt documents to recipients inside and outside their organisation. To have greater control over document access, modification, and printing, authors also can apply different permissions within a single document for each intended recipient. Unlike most other electronic document formats, the security features of PDF help keep document access and usage limited to the intended parties, anywhere a protected document is delivered. For both digital signatures and document control, Acrobat 6.0 now includes native support for most popular Certificate Authorities and hardware tokens through the Microsoft® CryptoAPI on Windows®. Working with leaders in the security industry, such as Entrust and VeriSign, Adobe provides comprehensive document security solutions that integrate with enterprise infrastructure.

For more information on Adobe security solutions and partners, visit: www.adobe.com/security. For more information about Adobe Systems, please visit LEWIS’ Virtual Press Room at http://www.lewisvpr.com/clients/adobe.html