Office 2003 Add-in: Word Redaction

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"Redaction is the careful editing of a document to remove confidential information.

The Microsoft Office Word 2003 Redaction Add-in makes it easy for you to mark sections of a document for redaction. You can then redact the document so that the sections you specified are blacked out. You can either print the redacted document or use it electronically.

Sensitive government documents, confidential legal documents, insurance contracts, and other sensitive documents are often redacted before being made available to the public. With the Word 2003 Redaction Add-in, users of Microsoft Office Word 2003 now have an effective, user-friendly tool to help them redact confidential text in Word documents.

Notes:
We recommend that you carefully review any documents redacted using this tool to confirm that all the information that you intended to redact was successfully redacted."

I sure hope MS did their homework and closely reviewed this. It would not be pretty for them if someone "important" released a redacted document and another party was able to remove the redaction. Redaction's on produced/delivered documents, by their very nature, have to be secure, permanente and inviolable.


Taking a quick 2 second pass at trying to break this, and so far it looks like MS did a good job.


What happens is that in the original Word document you mark sections/words/etc for redaction. Then you "Redact Document". This creates a new Word document with the redactions in place. During the Redact Document step, the Add-in appears to actually replace the redacted characters with ASCII character 124, aka the vertical pipe symbol, |


I focused on this new, redacted document to see if there was an easy way to get the original text back out.

First, can I select, cut and paste out the original text? Nope.

Second, using the Word Object Model/API can I get the original text? Nope (Tested via Office Spy)

Third, what about SaveAs *.txt? Nope, still can't get the original text.

Fourth, what about opening the DOC in notepad? Nope, the original text is not easily viewable

Finally, Track Changes. Turing track changes on for the original document, redacted some text, “Redacted Document”. Now in the new document, can I turn off/reject/view original text? Nope. Still redacted.


So while it looks like this is a good, workable tool if you are still concerned you might want to wait for forensic professionals to weigh in before using it.