The modern digital landscape that facilitates real-time collaboration has also created an enormous attack surface. Today, documents containing malicious constructs are a leading cause of data breaches in the government and private sectors.
Warnings about the dangers of suspicious files abound, yet people’s jobs depend on documents – reading and reacting to them, filling out forms, etc. Even if one can authenticate the immediate provider of the document, its contents may originate from an untrusted source and may contain malicious data payloads.
Researchers with DARPA’s Safe Documents (SafeDocs) program have developed new methods and tools that allow people to confidently open documents and trust what they see on their screens.