Redaction in the Document Management Software Viewer

Eliminate the use of black markers and photocopying to remove sensitive information from documents.  Redaction is the ability to black out text or images directly in the document management software viewer.

Secure Document Redaction Techniques

The traditional technique of redacting confidential material from a paper document, before its public release, involves crossing out portions of text with a wide black pen followed by photocopying the result. This is a relatively easy to understand process and but has major risks associated with it. For example, if the black pen is not wide enough, careful examination of the resulting photocopy may still reveal partial information about the text, such as the difference between short and tall letters. The exact length of the removed text also remains recognizable, which may help to guess plausible wordings for shorter redacted sections. Where computer-generated proportional fonts were used, even more information can leak out of the redacted section in the form of the exact position of nearby visible characters.

The document management software viewer provides a secure process with word processing file formats. These may also save a revision history of the edited text that still contains the redacted text. In some file formats, unused portions of memory are saved that may still contain fragments of previous versions of the text. Where text is redacted by overlaying graphical elements (usually black rectangles) on top of text, the original text remains in the file and can be uncovered by simply deleting the overlaying graphics. Effective redaction of electronic documents requires the actual removal of the text or image data from the document file.

Redaction usually requires a marking of the redacted area with the reason why the content is being restricted.  It provides a 100% secure way to remove sensitive information such as drivers license numbers from sensitive documents. The Redaction Viewer module is be purchased with the document management Viewer module.

Click here to see a screen capture of the security features in our document management software viewer.