Data Leakage/Loss Prevention (DLP) Systems Analysis and Solutions

Abstract

Sensitive and confidential data is a requisite for most of the companies, so protection of this data takes great attention by company top management, administrators and IT managers. Data leakage causes negative impact on companies. The traditional security approaches, such as firewalls, can’t protect data from leakage. Data Leakage/Loss Prevention (DLP) systems are the solutions that protect sensitive data from being in non-trusted hands. This thesis is an attempt to study DLP systems that will be conducted as well as a comparison with traditional security approach and discover the weakness of DLP approach. In this thesis we are testing and evaluating five different DLP systems implemented in the IT market and showing the weaknesses in these systems and propose a model to enhance these weaknesses. A simple approach has been developed to solve some of these weaknesses which enhances the effectiveness of DLP systems. Furthermore to these evaluations and tests, a complementing proof of concept solution may be developed so that it could be built-in with DLP solutions. The experimental results showed that DLP systems suffer from weaknesses such as, all DLP not work in safe mode, cannot discover encryption and compressed file also cannot discover data hidden when using steganography technique and still need improvement and enhancement. The idea of our model is using a precaution method to destroy hidden vii data before being sent by email, USB flash memory or uploaded outside the network. The importance of our proposed model is to protect data and ensure that no hidden data might be leaked. The results show after executing proposed model on samples of hidden data in the images, the hidden data has been destroyed minimal effect on resolution and quality on these images