Title

Prevent permissions change on 'rights managed' content - Office (Cat II impact)

Discussion

The Information Rights Management feature of the 2007 Office release allows individuals and administrators to specify access permissions to Word 2007 documents, Excel 2007 workbooks, PowerPoint 2007 presentations, InfoPath 2007 templates and forms, and Outlook 2007 e-mail messages. This functionality helps prevent sensitive information from being printed, forwarded, or copied by unauthorized people. This setting can be used to prevent 2007 Office users from changing the IRM permissions of a document. If this setting is Enabled, users can open and edit documents for which they have the appropriate permissions, but they cannot create new rights-managed content, add IRM to existing documents, change existing IRM permissions, or remove IRM from documents. This configuration can prevent users from making effective use of IRM to protect documents

Check Content

The policy value for User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Microsoft Office 2007 system -> Manage Restricted Permissions “Prevent users from changing permissions on rights managed content” will be set to “Disabled”. Procedure: Use the Windows Registry Editor to navigate to the following key: HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\DRM Criteria: If the value DisableCreation is REG_DWORD = 0, this is not a finding.

Fix Text

The policy value for User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Microsoft Office 2007 system -> Manage Restricted Permissions “Prevent users from changing permissions on rights managed content” will be set to “Disabled”. "Note: Group Policy Administrative Templates are available from the www.microsoft.com download site. The MS Office 2007 System (Office12.adm) is included in the AdminTemplates.exe file. This template provides the mechanisms to incorporate Microsoft Office 2007 System policies via the Microsoft Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc)." "Note: If the Microsoft Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc) is not used to incorporate the remediation to this vulnerability the Microsoft Registry Editor (regedit.exe) may be used to create the registry key and value required."

Additional Identifiers

Rule ID: SV-18968r1_rule

Vulnerability ID: V-17765

Group Title:

Expert Comments

CCIs tied to check.

Controls tied to check. These are derived from the CCIs shown above.