Documentation Security & Blueprint Security

How DRM security can protect your documentation & blueprints

Although not perhaps one of the first questions for Homeland Security, interest is now turning to documentation of systems and buildings.

Building documentation (better known as blueprint because since the 1860’s the way of copying big drawings left a blue background and the lines showed through white) can be very exciting.

Getting into a building or a complex the unauthorized way is so much easier if you have the blueprint.  If the blueprint is not secure, you have in your hands the exact structure, where it is vulnerable and open to attack, and how to get in and out without being noticed.  Sounds like a film?  But today’s terrorist, freedom fighter or similar is well able to make use of this kind of information to know where the vantage points are.  A blueprint needs security.

Documentation security is every bit as important.  The details of where all the power supplies are, the gas point or the water supply, maybe the alarm system, and in tall buildings the automatic fire system and air conditioning.  And this is even more so when they are computer controlled and the cabling is clearly identified.  These days it seems that bank robbers don’t use them because they prefer the Internet for white collar crime, but they can be of immense interest to other people.  Say, the blueprint of a major stadium, or a super tall building, could give unprecedented knowledge about how to enter and manipulate everything inside the location.

So documentation and blueprint security have catapulted themselves from not being very interesting unless you happen to be an architect or a builder, to being very important indeed.

Some aspects of documentation and blueprint security are to do with physical controls.  Working copies (still on paper because amendments are written onto them as the job progresses) have to be available as the location is built.  It can be difficult to control everything to do with these, simply because of the massive amount of paper that has to be issued all the way through the development.

But once the work is finished, the ‘final cut’ of the documentation can be much more easily protected, although it then requires DRM class technology to achieve adequate control.  Documentation security and blueprint security are about limiting the ability of someone to be able to make their own copies without control or licensing.  That also means being able to identify clearly the ‘source’ of printed documents, and when they were made (this is particularly critical when it relates to modifications to the original blueprint or document).

So documentation security and blueprint security turn out to be much more important than has previously been understood, but can only be achieved by using DRM controls in order to limit the likelihood that they will become available to inappropriate users.

If you do not apply DRM controls to documents and blueprints then there is no control over them at all.