Partners are critical to everything we do in the security space, and we are very proud of the best-of-breed Community we have fostered in order to best create solutions based on Adobe’s capabilities and customized to each customer’s needs.

With that in mind, we’re always extremely pleased to see cooperation among our many security partners so that they can also mutually leverage their capabilities which in the end is all the better for our own customers.

One of our partners, Communication Intelligence Corporation (CIC), a key electronic signature industry player, recently announced a partnership with 4Point Solutions, one of our foremost LiveCycle systems integrators, to promote closer integration of their technologies.

And ARX, Inc., a security partner offering a convenient , virtually plug-and-play CA and signing appliance, CoSign, announced relationships (here and here) with two of our Certificate Authority partners, GlobalSign and ChosenSecurity,to provide more complete and easy-to-deploy solutions around these two companies’ digital ID offerings.

So, how do these new relationships benefit Adobe’s customers? CIC’s relationship with 4Point means that customers deploying LiveCycle will have more electronic signature options on the table. With ARX, customers looking to speed workflows with digital signatures can deploy the ARX CoSign product, centrally storing user signing credentials from GlobalSign or Chosen Security, both leading certificate authorities in their own right.

Posted by John B Harris at 11:46 AM | Permalink

This entry is part of our continuing educational series, “What is an Electronic Signature, Anyway?” (Parts 1, 2 and 3.)

In June, at an event at the National Press Club, Jerry Buckley, Founding Partner at the Buckley Kolar law firm in Washington DC, as well as Counsel to the Electronic Signatures and Records Association (ESRA), an organization devoted to promulgating the use of electronic signatures & documents and educating the public & industry on those matters, stated that the “train had left the station” when it came to electronic signature usage around the world. As the demand for more fully electronic workflows becomes more pronounced, especially given the meteoric rise in gas, and thus shipping, prices, as well as an increasing desire on the part of enterprises and organizations to ‘go green,’ electronic signatures will become even more ubiquitous.

Continue reading "“The train has left the station!” - Electronic Signatures in the Real World" »

Posted by John B Harris at 09:55 AM | Permalink

In early 2008 PTC shipped Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 4, their integrated solution for 3D CAD/CAM. As announced in our relationship last year, PTC and Adobe have worked together to integrate Adobe LiveCycle Rights Management ES directly into Pro/ENGINEER, providing native CAD document protection. Sold as the Pro/ENGINEER Rights Management Extension, this solution exclusively works with Adobe LiveCycle Rights Management ES, allowing designers to provide persistent and dynamic access control to Pro/ENGINEER part, assembly, and drawing files.

Adobe's latest release of the LiveCycle Rights Management -- ES Update 1 -- provides additional functionality for Pro/ENGINEER customers wishing to manage and track iterated versions of protected parts and assemblies. These extensions enable designers to ensure that suppliers are instantly updated to the latest version of a design, decreasing the pain of mismatched versions when designing products sourced from multiple organizations.

Click on the following screenshot of Pro/ENGINEER for a brief tour of the functionality:

Need more information on how your organization can effectively manage and protect your intellectual property? Further information can be obtained at http://www.adobe.com/go/rm or by contacting Adobe

Posted by Jonathan Herbach at 04:59 PM | Permalink

Two weeks ago, Adobe held its annual 2008 Security Partner Summit.  The Summit is designed to offer partners the chance to see where our products are headed, to learn how they can best leverage the security capabilities in those products, and, most importantly, to interact directly with our product management & engineering teams to affect the future course of our products.  The Summit also provides Adobe with a great opportunity to listen to what our partners are hearing from their customers and how the changes we make in our products impact their business.

Partners in attendance were able to gaze into the future of both Adobe Acrobat and LiveCycle ES.  They also heard the latest on Adobe’s...

• thought leadership on electronic signatures;
• EMEA partner strategy and unique regional requirements; and
• Rights management capabilities and partnering opportunities.

For Adobe, partners are absolutely essential when it comes to matters of security as we define it: electronic / digital signatures, authentication, and rights management / encryption.  Our philosophy is to build robust capabilities into our own products and then adapt to particular customer needs through the careful selection of partners who can bring these solutions into being.  Whether it’s a handwritten electronic signature required to open an account at a bank branch office, single sign-on authentication into a LiveCycle administration portal, or certifying the US Federal Budget, our Security Partner Community is part and parcel of our ability to deliver powerful, compelling security solutions to clients the world over.

If you are a developer or systems integrator working with Adobe products and focusing on security, you owe it to yourself and your customers to join Adobe’s Solution Partner Program and Adobe’s Security Partner Community (SPC) .  As a member of these two programs you’ll get access to a wide variety of benefits, including invitations to the annual Security Partner Summit & our MAX Conference. 

If you're already a member of our Solution Partner Program, but haven't yet reached out to the SPC, what are you waiting for?  Adobe’s next Security Partner Summit is scheduled for 5-6 May 2009...we look forward to seeing you there!

And oh...about my speech relating security to my vacation in the Bahamas?  Well, you had to be there.  ;-)

Posted by John B Harris at 04:11 PM | Permalink

The RSA Conference is one of the most highly respected information security conferences and exhibitions in the industry.  This year, the Conference runs from April 7-11 in San Francisco, California, at the Moscone Convention Center.  Anyone who’s anyone in the information security space, specifically companies and individuals involved in authentication, identity management, encryption, and cryptography, will be there.  Attendees (over 17,000 expected) represent every key vertical market and range from C-level executives to front line IT staff.  Heck, even Al Gore is making an appearance (no really...he’s one of the keynotes at the event!).

Adobe will be exhibiting at Booth 828 and demonstrating our LiveCycle ES and Acrobat products, highlighting their electronic signature and rights management capabilities.  If you are planning on attending, please come by and say hello!  Learn about the latest updates to our product and feature line-up, as well as our integration with a wide variety of partners, many of whom will also be exhibiting at the event (see below).  We’ll be happy to answer any questions you have. 

The extended Security Solutions team, including product managers, engineering, and sales engineers will be on hand during RSA, not only manning the demo stations at the booth, but also roving the floor, and speaking at the conference itself.  For example, John Landwehr, director of Security Solutions and Strategy at Adobe, will be speaking on Thursday, April 10 at 8:00 AM on a panel (DEPL-301) with Deloitte & Touche covering the topic of Information Classification and its critical application to the questions of security policy, data leakage and rights management in the enterprise.

If your company is interested in a partnering relationship with Adobe, please visit the booth and ask for John Harris, who manages our security alliances.

We look forward to meeting you in San Francisco next week!  Our Security Partner Community will also be exhibiting at RSA...be sure to visit them and ask how they work hand-in-hand with Adobe:                                                

Partner	Booth #
ActiveIdentity	Booth 657
Athena Smartcard Solutions	Booth 1350
Arcot Systems, Inc.	Booth 1045
CoreStreet Ltd.	Booth 1350
Entrust	Booth 817
Gemalto Inc.	Booth 1923
nCipher Inc.	Booth 2129
RSA, The Security Division of EMC	Booth 1717
SafeNet, Inc.	Booth 1039
SOFTPRO GmbH	Booth 1332
VeriSign, Inc.	Booth 1316

Posted by John B Harris at 02:36 PM | Permalink

Here is a demonstration of a PDF document that has a certifying signature plus four recipient signatures from four different certificate authorities that are part of Adobe's Certified Document Services (CDS) program.

Click here to download the PDF for Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader version 6 and higher.

In v8 and higher, you will see a status bar across the top, indicating the valid document certification:

followed by the recipient signatures from each of the CAs:

For long term digital signature validation, each of these signatures also include an embedded OCSP response from the certificates in the chains and RFC3161 timestamps. This shows that the certificates were valid at the time of signing - even if the document is subsequently opened after certificate expiration or revocation.

Posted by John Landwehr at 11:30 PM | Permalink

The amazing proliferation of PDF files—over 1 billion at latest estimate—combined with the ubiquity of the internet and online information makes it critical that document creators and document readers consider the authorship and integrity of documents we trust on a daily basis as sources of information, conduits for personal data (forms), and, truly, receptacles for corporate and organizational reputation.

Let’s consider the “pump and dump” stock scams that have occurred over the past few years. By creating false press releases, fraudsters were able to ‘pump’ up the price of a stock by creating fake, positive news items for the company, and then ‘dump’ before the scam was discovered and the company's reputation damaged.

This type of fraud is but one possibility. When you fill out and submit information in a PDF form online, do you ever check for the authorship of the document? Who’s to say the form wasn’t modified to send your personally identifiable information (PII) to the government office AND to an identity thief at the same time? What about corporate annual reports? Government laws and regulations? Analyst reports? Licensing documentation?

Several years ago, Adobe recognized these threats, and worked with GeoTrust (acquired last year by Verisign) to create the Adobe Certified Document Services program alongside the release of Acrobat® and Reader® 6.0.

By joining this program, interested individuals and organizations were required to submit to a strong identity vetting process to make sure they were who they said they were, and then would be issued a credential (digital certificate) on a hardware token (USB or smart card device). When used with the Adobe software, an author could choose to ‘certify’ a document upon authoring. Once certified with a CDS credential, the document’s integrity, authorship, and even time and date of creation would be embedded with the document. And because the credential was provided under Adobe’s high assurance policies, the digital signature is automatically trusted in both Acrobat and Reader v6.0 and above, giving the recipient an immediate notification of the document’s integrity with a blue ribbon and bar at the top of the window.

Now, Adobe has partnered with three additional credential Providers for the CDS Program: Chosen Security, GlobalSign and Keynectis. (Providers' announcements are here, here and here.)  This program expansion will substantially enhance the standing and awareness of the CDS program, while at the same time offering a broader range of services to all aspects of the marketplace through innovative services and solutions. In addition, these companies, as well as current CDS member Verisign, have a global footprint, which means that the document integrity capabilities offered by these CDS Providers, and built into Adobe Acrobat and Reader, will benefit documents created throughout the world.

For more information, click here.

Posted by John B Harris at 07:49 AM | Permalink

Every once in a while, someone asks "How long has Adobe offered content protection?" Turns out, Adobe's information assurance efforts have been ramping up for over a dozen years. Adobe provides security features in numerous products and also provides dedicated security solutions such as LiveCycle Digital Signatures and LiveCycle Rights Management. Here's a brief history:

Adobe's history of content protection started with Acrobat 2.0 in 1994. At the time, this was simple 40-bit RC4 password-based encryption and digital rights management (DRM) to restrict who can open the document and what they can do with it.

Acrobat 4.0 in 1999 added support for Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) enabling a single PDF document to be protected for multiple recipients, with different permissions based on their own keypair. Depending on who opened the document, printing, modification, and clipboard actions are enabled/disabled. This release was also the first to add digital signatures using PKI. This was important for paper documents to move to digital with an opportunity for higher levels of assurance than a pen could provide on paper with a wet signature (ink) by utilizing cryptographic protections of authenticity, integrity, and non-repudiation. Acrobat 5.0 added support for 128-bit RC4 encryption for stronger levels of confidentiality. Acrobat 6.0 added support for the Microsoft CryptoAPI to (CAPI) so the keypair could be stored in the Windows certificate store or through a Crypto Service Provider (CSP) to smartcards and other tokens.

In 2005, Acrobat and Reader 7.0 shipped along with LiveCycle Policy Server and Security Server. AES128 encryption was added to PDF. The enterprise rights management capabilities of Policy Server integrate with an organization's LDAP or Active Directory. A policy coupled with an information classification such as "Insider Restricted" restricts who can open the document, what they can do with it, and also provides enterprise auditing measures. Absolute (e.g. on 12/31) and relative (e.g. 7 years from document creation) expiration dates can be set to automatically expire documents. All these permissions in a policy are dynamic and can change after the document is published - to add or delete users, change permissions, or even revoke the document entirely. This revocation feature is used by many to enable version control outside a repository, so as a document is changed on the server all distributed copies of that document are automatically revoked providing the recipient with a notification to go back to the server for a current version. Visual watermarking capabilities on PDF are able to show the policy name, recipient opening the document, and the date/time. Acrobat and Reader 7.0 were also US Department of Defense (DoD) certified by the Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC). The LiveCycle Security Server provided the ability to apply and validate digital signatures as well as encrypt and decrypt document in an automated business process. Flash Media Server 2 provided protected streaming capabilities for delivering video to Flash Player.

As we wrap up 2007, there has been a lot going on over the last 12 months. Acrobat, Reader, and LiveCycle shipped with new FIPS 140 approved encryption libraries. LiveCycle Rights Management (formerly Policy Server) now supports native Microsoft Office documents as well as Dassault CATIA. LiveCycle Digital Signatures (formerly Security Server) provides XML signature support as well as certified documents and is integrated with automated forms and document generation processes. Adobe's rights management has been integrated into hardware devices such as Multi Function Peripherals (MFPs) from Ricoh and others. Third party software vendors including PTC and Hitachi/Lattice3D are integrating Rights Management into their native applications. Adobe Media Player is in public pre-release with support for content protection on downloadable and offline Flash video.

What about 2008 and beyond? Stay tuned for more entries as Adobe's security solutions expand to protect even more aspects of the information lifecycle - independent of storage, independent of transport, across operating systems and file formats.

Posted by John Landwehr at 09:32 AM | Permalink

Arcot, a member of Adobe's security partner community, just announced their Flash-based two-factor browser authentication solution as well as support of Adobe Integrated Runtime (which was also announced today as available in beta, and formerly codenamed Apollo). Arcot's "software smartcard" solution provides greatly improved simplicity and security for consumer logins to online applications.

Usernames and passwords alone have reached the end of their useful life for protecting valuable online transactions because they are often reused by consumers across sites, easily guessed, and subject to phishing. While today's web browsers provide PKI authentication using SSLv3 client authentication, there is not a consistent or friendly user experience across browsers and operating systems to provision and utilize the necessary PKI credential. That's why you often hear PKI = Painful Key Infrastructure instead of Public Key Infrastructure.

Arcot has developed a seamless provisioning and utilization of PKI credentials in the form of an ArcotID. While the user logs in with their existing username/password, a SWF in the browser is providing PKI authentication behind the scenes using a locally stored credential in the form of an ArcotID.

ArcotID Flash client is part of WebFort, Arcot's two-factor authentication system for large enterprises in financial services, healthcare and other industries facing increasing regulatory pressure to protect and verify end-users’ identities such as those from the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Posted by John Landwehr at 08:21 AM | Permalink

Adobe information assurance solutions enable organizations to more securely engage with employees, business associates, and customers by protecting the information lifecycle. Security can be persistently applied independent of storage and transport, reaching inside and outside an organization. Adobe's ecosystem of security partners provide interoperability with many security infrastructures including identity and access management, single-sign-on, public key infrastructures, smart cards, biometrics, multifunction printer/scanner devices, and other third party applications and file formats.

2007 will be a year of increased focus on security partners. We are firm proponents of the idea that strong and successful security solutions only come from a strong security partner ecosystem, and we are making significant changes in the way we interact with this community.

To hear more about our new partner programs, features and focus - and participate in upcoming Security Summits, see additional details here.

Posted by John Landwehr at 08:41 AM | Permalink

Acrobat and Reader 8 includes a new "Roaming Credential" feature to make digital signatures easier to use and deploy. Arcot has just announced their SignFort server to utilize this capability.

Digital signatures historically required credential provisioning to desktop clients in the form of software or hardware-based PKI certificates - before a signature could ever be applied. These credentials can be accessed by Acrobat and Reader via PKCS#12 files on disk, or via PKCS#11 libraries and CryptoAPI Crypto Service Providers (CSPs) in Microsoft Windows, or via custom client plug-ins. Both PKCS#11 and CSPs usually require additional 3rd party software libraries to be distributed to the clients for hardware tokens such as smartcards and usb keys. Additionally after the first certificate is issued, they ultimately expire and need to be reguarly renewed at the client by requesting a new certificate from the Certificate Authority. Distributing the additional software and managing client certificates is why some people have referred to PKI as "Painful" Key Infrastructure, instead of Public Key Infrastructure.

The new "Roaming Credential" capability in Acrobat and Reader 8 does not require additional software deployment or credential management (provioning or renewal) on the client to do a digital signature. A new webservice protocol was developed to utilize a product, such as Arcot's SignFort, to broker the credential management in a centralized server.

When signing a document with roaming credentials, the user clicks a signature field, authenticates, and saves the signed document. That's it.

The address of the roaming credential server can be specified as a "seed value" preference in the signature field itself, on a per-document basis. Or, the Acrobat and Reader application itself can be configured to use a roaming credential server for all documents, even without seed values on the signature fields of documents.

Authentication is either username/password, Windows kerberos single-sign-on, or the ArcotID.

When the roaming credential service is used, the user authentication is sent to the server along with the hash of the document. The server verifies the authentication and maps to a user's credential stored on the server, optionally in a Hardware Security Module (HSM). That credential then signs the hash and returns the value to the desktop to be embedded in the document.

This capability is especially useful when sending documents outside an organization's firewall for business partners and customers to apply digital signatures. As long as those external users already have a supported authenticaiton credential as described above, and have Adobe Acrobat or Reader 8, they can sign a document tied to a roaming credential server without any additional software deployments or configuration on their client.

Posted by John Landwehr at 09:40 AM | Permalink

The Adobe Security Solutions Team is scheduled to present at Oracle OpenWorld San Francisco. Session S283319, titled "Using Adobe LiveCycle to Secure and Control documents in Oracle Content Database and Oracle Records Database" will be held in Moscone West Room 2012 from 4:00-5:00pm on Wednesday October 25, 2006.

This session describes a joint Oracle/Adobe solution in which Adobe LiveCycle products provide enterprise rights management, digital signatures, encryption, and security policies to documents stored in Oracle Content Database and Oracle Records Database. The session describes both the problem space and the technology and software architecture applied to address the problem.

Posted by John Landwehr at 11:56 AM | Permalink

Posted by John Landwehr at 04:37 PM | Permalink

Today at the AIIM/ON DEMAND Conference, Ricoh and Adobe announced an agreement to develop and co-market document scanning, printing and security solutions. The integration of Adobe's Policy Server enterprise rights management software and Adobe print + scan technologies with Ricoh multifunction (MFP) devices transforms the way knowledge workers convert paper processes into more secure digital workflows. Paper can be easily scanned and encrypted into PDF to control who has subsequent electronic access and usage permissions.

"We are natural partners in that Ricoh has long provided world class digital products and solutions, and Adobe is the standard in document software," said Katsumi Yoshida, Corporate Executive Vice President, Ricoh. "We look forward to developing together new document solutions that truly bridge the paper and digital worlds. Our Fortune Global 500 customers demand the most advanced solutions and we will deliver."

Posted by John Landwehr at 12:27 PM | Permalink

Communication Intelligence Corporation (“CIC”) announced the release of their latest Sign-it software for electronic signatures in applications from Adobe Systems.

It is estimated that fifty billion original paper documents are generated each year in the US alone, that the expense associated with paper documents is over 15% of annual corporate revenue and that 60% of those paper documents are signature dependent (Coopers & Lybrand, Gartner Group). Leveraging electronic signature solutions to achieve a truly paperless environment affords organizations major benefits including significant expense reduction, compressed business cycles and enhanced security.

Adobe’s support of CIC in the development and release of this new eSignature capability represents our commitment to further advancing LiveCycle for use in paperless transactions within the large enterprise. In concert with our LiveCycle products, CIC’s Sign-it allows the flexibility to address a broad range of electronic signature needs for the modern enterprise and enables organizations to complete the final step in automating their document processes. The rich set of integration and implementation tools CIC provides in combination with Sign-it also provide tremendous value to our Adobe System Integrators and ISV partners.

Posted by John Landwehr at 04:40 PM | Permalink

Adobe offers Active Directory Single Sign On in LiveCycle Policy Server, including support for smartcard authentication.

As announced by Quest Software, Adobe utilizes Quest's Vintela Single Sign-on for Java to provide native authentication of Java and J2EE applications and services with Active Directory.

This technology is currently shipping in Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server providing users with cross-platform access to Active Directory and single-sign-on. When a user is logged into their Windows desktop, they do not need to log in again to view a Policy Server protected document. The kerberos authentication information from the operating system is passed through Adobe's desktop applications (e.g. Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Reader, and other native Rights Management plug-ins) to the Policy Server. If the user logged in using a smartcard to authenticate to their desktop, that credential can also used by Policy Server as a single sign on token.

Posted by John Landwehr at 06:58 AM | Permalink

At CeBIT this week, IBM announced that they are working with Adobe on Enterprise Rights Management (ERM) solutions to help companies protect their intellectual property and digital data from product theft.

The protection of commercial rights is becoming a major issue for many international companies. As a result of globalization, supplier and cooperation networks are becoming increasingly complex, and development and production data is being made accessible to ever-larger groups of users. Much of the development data and documents in question are "unprotected" against unauthorized access and redistribution.

IBM and Adobe are collaborating to offer joint solutions and services for worldwide Enterprise Rights Management that extends beyond the company firewall.

"The global access rights are issued by the Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server, which we host in our IBM computer centers with high availability and global access options", said Michael Diemer, Vice President Strategic Outsourcing, IBM Information Technology Services.

"This means that we are immediately able to offer our customers the full ERM functionality of the Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server. In addition, we advise our customers on all ERM requirements and work with Adobe to offer complete end-to-end solutions to ensure maximum protection of their intellectual property, thereby making it difficult for intellectual property thieves."

Adobe and IBM are demonstrating this solution in the front row of IBM's primary CeBIT Booth F41/51, dempoint #1.

Here are links to the Enlgish and German press releases.

Posted by John Landwehr at 06:31 AM | Permalink

Posted by John Landwehr at 12:24 PM | Permalink