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I am a non technical founder of a tech startup, so please go easy if my question is too tertiary for your level. Every time I use Amazon Prime video to watch a tv show/movie and take a screenshot it comes out as everything as is except the movie comes out to be a black screen.

See this image here:

enter image description here

I want to implement the same technology to my documents but my Technology engineers don't even know what this technology is called let alone implement it.

I want my clients:

  1. To not be able to Take a Screenshot (using printscreen or otherwise)
  2. To not be able to Take a print of the document or the browser page with content in it
  3. To not be able to download the document
  4. If they use an external camera to take picture of the screen using an external device so it gives a unique code so I know exactly whose account the details were pirated from. I am going to be working with corporate clients who would take this breach extremely seriously so I need this same technology that movie theatres us (or so I have heard) blurring and a unique code.

These are extremely sensitive and confidential documents and I need to prove to my clients that replication is not acceptable with a zero tolerance policy from our side, as I am distribution platform for my clients.

So, please let me know what is this technology called and how my engineers can implement this on my document sharing platform?

Alternatively, if there are other technologies that will help me achieve these same objectives, do let me know.

halfer
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WealthAuthor
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1 Answers1

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  1. To not be able to Take a Screenshot (using printscreen or otherwise)
  2. To not be able to Take a print of the document or the browser page with content in it

Without hardware/operating system support (see below); that would involve some very intrusive hooks into the OS (e.g. to modify the code that normally takes screenshots, etc).

  1. To not be able to download the document

That's not how things normally work. Instead, you let them download encrypted content that can't be decrypted unless they have the right key. This is built into various pieces of hardware (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content_Protection ).

  1. If they use an external camera to take picture of the screen using an external device so it gives a unique code so I know exactly whose account the details were pirated from.

That doesn't seem useful - any unique code that is visible enough to be used to determine whose account it came from will be visible enough for a pirate to know that they need to blank out the area where the code is. For video (and not static documents/images) you could make it a bit harder by putting the code at a different place in each frame (but that gets horribly expensive for "decode, alter, encode" processing).

These are extremely sensitive and confidential documents and I need to prove to my clients that replication is not acceptable with a zero tolerance policy from our side, as I am distribution platform for my clients.

If they're extremely sensitive and confidential documents then they should not be on distribution platform. For extremely sensitive and confidential documents you want a secure area (with physical security - strong mechanical door locks, etc) containing a private network where nothing in the room is allowed to be connected to the Internet at all.

Brendan
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  • Just to expand a bit: HDCP is one platform-agnostic protection mechanism, OSs such as Windows and OS X have more general-purpose protections such as Output Protection Manager (that will sometimes use HDCP). There's also some standard for protecting streaming content in web browsers but I forget the details. – Dave S Nov 02 '19 at 08:21
  • _any unique code that is visible enough to be used to determine whose account it came from will be visible enough for a pirate to know that they need to blank out the area where the code is_ - this is not true. There is a process called "digital watermarking" that embeds subtle changes across an image that cannot be detected by the human eye, but can be picked up by an algorithm. – halfer Nov 02 '19 at 10:30
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    @halfer: For verbatim copies of the original files there's a lot you can do to hide information (trivial example is re-purposing the least significant bit/s in pixel data). It doesn't work for people taking photos of the screen with a smartphone/camera because those subtle changes end up being too subtle to survive re-sampling. – Brendan Nov 02 '19 at 12:18
  • Thanks Brendan, interesting. I vaguely recall that makers of proprietary watermarking solutions claim their algorithms are hardy, but I expect they would say that! I imagine they use something like JPEG quantisation, but I agree that an aggressive loss of quality could not hope to preserve that information. – halfer Nov 02 '19 at 16:49