Secure Password Translation for Document Protection of SOHO Companies

Abstract

To set a password for MS-Office documents would be the most common method that users can think first for their document protection. People also consider the easiest and cheapest way to preserve the confidentiality of documents even though the strength of this security measure merely depends on the complexity of passphrase chosen by document authors. The human factor dependency in documents' password security has been an obstacle of choosing it as a major security countermeasure. In this work, we suggest a new password management scheme for SOHO companies with a limited budget for information security. We have named this scheme as the SPT (Secure Password Translation) which separates users' chosen passphrases and companies' chosen ones for document security. This separation brings about differentiating the security level of documents in accordance with the physical location of documents. The contribution of this work is in suggesting and implementing of security management scheme, which SOHO companies can deploy with a limited budget.