In this paper we present WebGuard, a content protection system for Web documents. WebGuard allows content owners to enforce control over the distribution and access to high-value digital
content. We define high-value digital content as either commercially valuable content (e.g. course
material, artwork, etc) or personal and confidential property (e.g. family photos, confidential
material, etc). The novelty of our approach is that WebGuard enables existing Web browsers and
browser plug-ins to handle protected content, in a way that is completely transparent to the
browser and its plug-ins. Our solution centers around three components: an application
certitication process and a content-protection
enabled http protocol handler, and an application-independent
user-interface control module. We show that using these three components a
complete end-to-end content protection system can be achieved. To demonstrate our approach we
have built a prototype of WebGuard using the Internet Explorer Browser and the Microsoft
protocol handler technology.
By: Magda Mourad, Jonathan Munson, Tamer Nadeem, Giovanni Pacifici, Marco Pistoia,Alaa Youssef
Published in: RC21944 in 2001
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