The move comes on the heels of the firm’s earlier release of a secure PDF viewer for Apple’s iOS mobile operating system.
“This makes a significant extension to the breadth of devices supporting the LockLizard PDC secure format,” said Trevor Mathews, chairman of LockLizard. “Our intention is to provide publishers with a consistent, high-quality DRM solution providing seamless control regardless of the type of device used to read secure documents.”
Mathews added: “The introduction of the BYOD approach to office equipment, and the blending of work, travel and home have fuelled a massive growth in the use of powerful, portable tablet devices. But these developments have not been without their own problems. Unfortunately, security and DRM provisions for these types of devices have received less attention than the provision of basic functionality whilst the initial market develops. As is often the case, security has had to wait while rapid changes to the new platforms stabilize.”
According to LockLizard, the look and feel of the Android operating system has been maintained to ensure a quality user experience processing protected PDF files, as well as to support the expected look and feel of that environment. No change of format or new secured document structure is required, so Android users can use existing PDC documents. The addition of the new viewer is seamless for publishers and users alike, said the firm. Publishers still have fine control over access controls and dates, printing, number of views, watermarks, and so on.
The LockLizard Safeguard and Enterprise range of products operate so that secured documents are not held on or decrypted on the LockLizard Administration servers. Thus, the firm said its solution does not impose high server loadings caused by constantly distributing documents, and users can use secured documents offline when authorized. LockLizard affirmed that it never has access to either unsecured or secured documents being processed by its publishers. This is important for high-security systems because they may require assurance that the system supplier is not in a position to compromise its own security. This contrasts with alternative solutions in the DRM marketplace, such as feeding uncontrolled pages, one at a time, over an SSL link, or providing a browser plug-in linked to an ID/password control where one user can easily ‘give away’ their codes so that anyone can use a secured document, the company noted.
“In summary”, said Mathews, “it is a win-win situation for both publishers and customers. Publishers do not need to reprocess documents that have already been protected (although they may wish to set their accounts to force the use of the latest available viewer in order to take advantage of the enhanced security features) and customers are able to select from a far wider range of devices on which to use their documents.