Talk:SecurityFAQ

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Quick question: I'm a user, not a programmer, but I'm having a lot of fun with my OpenOffice 'suite'.

I do have this idea I'd like someone to take on to make it the greatest thing since white sliced bread for secure business files . . . an embedded document key.

Here's how it works. I download Open Office. I install it on my computers at my hotels in the Poconos, Durham NC, Columbia SC, and Morehead City NC; on my personal laptop, and at my home office in Pocono Lake; taking care to use the same zipped download on each machine. It's got this dandy new feature you added -- an embedded document key, some twenty-odd-digit code, randomly generated. When I install it on each of my computers, it drops randomly placed cookies in randomly picked or built files all over my hard drive, with another random code on each one so my Open Office suite -- and only my Open Office suite, as we shall see -- can find them later. These cookies, by the way, each also picks up some code off my hard drive -- a serial number or something -- for future reference that they just won't work without,

So I can save docs and spreadsheet files like anyone else .opd, .ops, whatever. Or . . . I can 'save as' an "encoded document" . . . .opdc, .opsc., whatever. Then, that's how I keep my books, and save my sensitive company documents.

I get hacked. Some bright bad guy looks in, hey, he's using open source software, this ought to be a cakewalk . . . Joy turns to heartbreak, though . . . my encoded docs and spreadsheets won't open for him unless he does it on one of my computers, using my Open Office download. Even if he boots both my files and my Open Office software, then cracks my password, it won't work on any computer he has unless he also went over my entire hard drive and found those randomly dropped encoded cookies . . . which won't work on his machine, even if he copied my entire hard drive, because that code they picked up off my hard drive when they were originally installed isn't on his...

Nor will any of my encoded files show up as anything on a DIR or Windows directory as anything other than a hidden file. So how's he going to know they're there unless he knows what I named them? And how am I even going to know what I named them once Open Office scrambles the filename, then unscrambles it when I ask to open that document again?

Could someone here make something like that?

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