Tag: Security

How Collabora Online Makes GDPR Compliance Easy

Richard Brock Leave a comment

Is your online office suite state of the art?

What is the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR for short?

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the toughest privacy and security law in the world. Though it was drafted and passed by the European Union (EU), it imposes obligations onto organizations anywhere, so long as they target or collect data related to people in the EU. The regulation was put into effect on May 25, 2018. The GDPR will levy harsh fines against those who violate its privacy and security standards, with penalties reaching into the tens of millions of euros.

Well that sounds scary, but what does GDPR really mean for businesses and how they collect and store data? In this quick guide, we will explain what you need to know about GDPR with a focus on how it relates to services such as Office365, Google Docs and Collabora Online.

Under GDPR, if a data ‘controller’ (an organisation that collects any personal data) wants to share personal data with a third-party ‘processor’ (an organization that processes this data, for example Microsoft or Google), they must ensure that the third-party processor provides sufficient guarantees that they will implement appropriate technical and organizational measures to protect the personal data. Even without sharing with third parties, the controller must also show that when “taking into account state of the art” technology, they are incorporating data protection “by design and by default”.

And if all this seems very abstract, it might be worth considering according to German legal firm CMS, there have been over 1,600 fines issued in the last five years, with the average fine a little over €2,400,000. These range from headline grabbing figures for Meta and Amazon, to hundreds and thousands of euros for small and medium businesses, hospitals, government administrations and other companies dotted around the world with European users. After removing the 45 individual fines over 1 million euros for this period, we calculate the average fine comes out at more than €300,000. Got your attention yet?

So what is “state of the art”, and “data protection by design and by default”. At Collabora, we believe the highest level of protection means having the strongest access control requirements, and for this, no-one else does or can do better.

Where is your data?

As technology and the internet has developed, file sharing and collaborative working have become vital for anyone trying to run an efficient business, or even just set a monthly budget or write a letter. We send files in email attachments, in messaging apps, through different file sharing websites, or on a USB stick. We know that there are bad actors ‘out there’, but as long as nothing happens to us, we try not to think about it too much.

 

The internet is a scary place if you’re on your own

But clearly this is not “state of the art”. The internet is a scary place, and if your data is out in the open like this, anyone could access it.

End to end encryption

Most businesses and applications however recognise the issue here, and the current received wisdom is that ‘end-to-end encryption’ will save the day. To offer you a quick refresher – the general idea with end-to-end encryption is that in order to prevent someone reading a letter who shouldn’t have access, the sender puts a padlock on their letter before putting it in the post, which is then unlocked upon arrival by the recipient. Postman Pat and the rest of the delivery company have no idea what was in the letter, everybody is happy. Sounds good right?

Yet there is an obvious issue staring us in the face with this methodology – it is only end-to-end. A well-intentioned attempt to keep corrupt postmen or system administrators away from your letters or stored data perhaps, but in terms of keeping your data safe in the wider scheme of things, utterly useless! As anyone who’s ever misplaced a letter, had someone read over their shoulder, or indeed had their house broken into can attest to. Where either end might be, who or what is going on there is literally anyone’s guess. End to end encryption also means – you can kiss goodbye to any guarantees of having a malware free server, you certainly can’t scan for viruses anymore or respond fully to a lawful freedom of information request. Nevermind the security implications of what happens when you or one of your staff leaves an ‘end’ with confidential data on it in a bar or taxi or train by mistake. The British government alone reported a total of “96 laptops, tablets, smartphones and other devices lost by or stolen from parliamentary staffers between January 2019 and December 2020, with one device disappearing within Downing Street itself”.

End-to-end encryption, then what?

As far as mitigating this issue goes, companies are left up the creek and without a paddle by this approach. Company laptops are issued that must themselves be encrypted to hopefully secure that end if it is ever lost, and personal laptops are banned, or further lengthy BYOD policies enacted with spurious levels of enforcement.

In the same way that welding your front door shut but leaving the window open is hardly safe, it’d be difficult to honestly argue that this is “data protection by design and by default”. In fact this lack of clarity over what happens at the server ‘end’ is precisely why the German and French governments are taking action to ban some public services from using Office 365 or Google Workspace.

Look, but don’t touch!

So must we accept our valuable data can never be truly safe? We don’t think so! The British Crown Jewels are estimated to be worth upwards of £3 billion. They have lived in the Tower of London since 1661, guarded by the British Army, rarely leaving the premises, yet they have been open to public viewing for most of this time. Within the castle grounds they are viewed by 2-3 million visitors every year, and the only attempted theft ended in failure in 1671. Perhaps our modern collaborative working arrangements could learn something from this open, but secure setup. Is there a way to enable users to view documents, without them leaving the safety of the castle? To look, but not touch?

Well, it turns out there is! While it may well be impractical to start your own international parcel delivery company, it turns out there’s very little stopping a company, individual or organisation from hosting their data within their own premises (be it office or castle!), or with a trusted Collabora partner, essentially running the data-delivery company yourself, and crucially with Collabora Online, sending only images of the viewed parts of the document (not the complete file) to the end users, giving as much or as little editing access as they see fit. Operating more like a hyper-efficient remote desktop than a browser-based editor, user activity is processed by the server in real time, meaning the actual file data never leaves the safety of the server, so no amount of malicious malware, technical tomfoolery or pernicious postmen can extract it from a browser or device. Lost your company laptop? Who cares?! There is no company data on it anyway, and before any bad actors even start looking up your mother’s maiden name, your childhood best friend and what street you grew up on, with a click of a mouse, you can make sure your castle server never communicates with it ever again. Remote wipe if you feel like it, but there’s really nothing on the device!

Collaborative data protection by design and by default

You should use the state of the art solution

If that’s not data protection by design and by default, using state of the art technology, then we don’t know what is. It also remains very unclear how any other software provider intends to honestly address the pressing issue of data security or GDPR compliance, as evidenced by weekly reports of leaks and fines. Don’t sweep the problem under someone else’s rug, be state of the art with Collabora Online and take control of your data.

 

Collabora Secure View – The Secure Way to Share Data and Support Productivity

Richard Brock Leave a comment

The ability to easily share data is at the very heart of personal and corporate productivity – it’s what helps develop competitive advantage and success, but, arguably, it’s never been more of a challenge. In a modern distributed work environment, outside of the traditional office setting, it’s vital to closely control the data you share, including where it resides, who can access it and what they can do with it. Collabora Secure View has a unique way to enable you to do this.

How to Share Without Sharing

At a very high level, all businesses want to be able to easily share documents, be they presentations, spreadsheets, new designs, etc., both internally amongst fellow staff members and externally with partners and other valued third-parties. Crucially, though, they don’t want to lose control of these documents, which often contain valuable, mission-critical data. This is a common business challenge that Collabora Secure View solves: stopping your secrets leaking!

Rapid Product Feedback & Iteration

Ironically, Collabora Secure View came about as a direct response to a critical business security challenge identified by a leading car manufacturer that approached our partner ownCloud for a solution. This is a real-life example of the value of customer /sales feedback, which, in this case, identified a business-productivity issue – exactly what Collabora Secure View is intended to enable – secure sharing of data that enables reliable and productive collaboration.

Ways Not To Do It?

There are two popular ways to do this wrong.

1. Unreliable, in-browser redaction

Those who adopt this approach use a front end that loads in a browser. They then transmit all of a document’s contents to the browser, often simply by converting it to html, where it is displayed. The main problem here is that in doing this they give the whole content of the document to anyone viewing it, which they can save, modify or pass on – it’s simply not secure!

Often a watermark layer is included on top of the document, but this can be reasonably easy to remove with a little knowledge of how to delete a few html nodes, revealing any restricted or hidden data. This is similar to the horrifying redaction mistakes we’ve seen in the past – and is insecure by design.

2. Hand all your keys to Microsoft

An alternative approach is to use Microsoft’s Digital Rights Management solution, which uses end-to-end encryption. This way of doing it is very secure, but comes with some important business trade-offs!

Firstly, you need to hand over all your document keys to Microsoft; you typically upload your keys onto Microsoft’s Azure Cloud – which provides a central point of failure. Secondly before a device can be given a document key – it is critical to this model to ensure that the end-point is secure and will correctly apply policies such as: “you cannot print this document.” Unfortunately this means that your entire client software stack has to be cryptographically signed from when the PC starts, through to Windows, and all the client software on top – with revocation and other complexity alongside. As a result, you loose control not only of your document keys, but also your entire client software stack, which is then controlled by a single vendor. On top of this, you also need a centralised Cloud infrastructure to share your keys – which seems to be close to the ultimate vendor lock-in.

This approach brings many potential problems, a remote server outage outside your control can loose you access to your most critical documents. Similarly if this is done right, a revocation event can force an immediate upgrade of your client software from the operating system through to the Office suite to regain access to your documents.

When done correctly, this “surrender your keys” scheme can provide the required security benefits, but at some significant expense in flexibility – particularly that you need to share data only with client devices that are fully signed by Microsoft: cutting out Mac, Android, iOS, Linux, etc.

Collabora’s Unique Solution

Secure View, which was developed in partnership with Dell and ownCloud, enables you to securely share all of your valuable data to any un-trusted client via the browser. How can this possibly work?

This high-degree of data security is achieved because your documents never leave your site, staying safe behind whatever security measures you choose, such as firewalls, VPNs and reverse proxys. Collabora Online sends pixels of a document, which can be shown to users on screen, the document itself remains safely in your server room. Only the sections visible on the screen are sent, and even then it’s only the rendered pixels, never the original document. This guarantees that no amount of trickery can extract your documents against your policy. Should the worst happen and a document view ends up where it shouldn’t, there is no way for the unintended recipient to extract the document.

Obviously, for ultimate security we wouldn’t even share the pixels with the client – but this tends to make the document a little hard to read. Having said that – it’s important to avoid even screenshots of the latest product plans being shared so we secure the pixels by including watermarks often with the viewers’ name in them on the server side. This ensures that accountability is obvious to the viewer and stops them getting over-excited about sharing the wonderful new product features, etc. prematurely.

Watermarked Image Using Collabora Secure View

Partners can apply arbitrarily powerful policy rules on top of our granular per-user access controls, customising watermarks and permissions, including the ability to edit, print, share or download. In addition server-side logging can trace who accessed what and when.

Robust Federated Sharing

Each server provides security by keeping the documents on your site – but how can we capture the benefit of a centralised solution when to comes to sharing? Many of our partners, such as Nextcloud and ownCloud, have already solved this problem with an ad-hoc standard. Their interoperable federated sharing allows you to mount file shares from friendly remote servers, in effect creating a custom Cloud of partner Clouds. This means that you can easily create direct share links with other users across your partner and even subsidiary ecosystem as well as to external third parties.

A Real Alternative That Gives You Control

Collabora Secure View provides easy-to-use secure data management functionality that allows you to control who can access a document, what they can see and what they can do with it. Importantly, this is done using your own infrastructure so you can protect digital sovereignty.

“Collabora Online is built with security in mind. We implement a robust, layered approach that helps give our customers the confidence in our products and the peace of mind they demand,” said Michael Meeks, General Manager, Collabora Productivity. “We love to work closely with partners to enrich our products with great new security features that meet their customers needs – it’s what we do.”

Secure View represents a practical and straightforward way of sharing important data that protects data sovereignty, security and integrity.