Scripting for File Protection

[Lou]

Here is our situation. Could someone steer me in the
right direction?

We need to send certain documents as email attactments,
but protect these files in such a way that the receipient
can view but not modify the document.

Starting with a txt file, we were thinking of a script
that would run automatically against the text file,
turning it into a Word Doc and setting Protection on. The
user would then include this file as the email
attachment.

Ideally, as much of this process would take place
automatically without users having to go through multiple
steps. Any ideas?

 

[Jonathan West]

Hi Lou,

Forget about distributing secure files using Word document format. Many,
many people have come up with suggestions for this, and on every occasion
when they have provided a supposedly "secure" document, it has taken me no
more than a minute or two to break the security and edit the text.

If you want to make it harder, convert the file to Acrobat PDF format and
set security on the PDF file so that printing and editing are both
prohibited.

Even this is not an absolute protection, since the user could take a
screenshot and run the resulting graphic through an OCR program to recover
the text.

Once the text leaves a secure environment, you cannot regard it as secure.

Now we have established that you cannot do what you were originally
suggesting, could you explain why you are wanting this? It might be that we
could suggest something that would achieve your overall aims by another
method.