Preventing document leakage through active document

Electronic documents inside any enterprise environment are assets that add to the enterprise´s capital in intellectual property such as design patents or customer information, securing, these assets is a priority requirement in any security system design. The security of these documents suffers when they have migrated outside the organisation security system, as there is not always possible to extend the enterprise security policy to limit/prevent access to those assets. This limitation in extending the originating security policy may be due to difference in technology used, domain or security policy. This paper presents the challenges faced when preventing document leakage. We propose active document as a measure to control/limit access when electronic document are outside its domain.