A Study Of Digital Signature Influence On The Security Of Word Processors

Word processors are one of the most widely used software applications in our time and have greatly contributed to the shift of paperless office. It has brought drastic changes in the way business documents are created, edited and stored. However word processors have over the years proven to be susceptible and have been successfully exploited to launch catastrophic attacks which have been costly to various states (countries), organizations and individuals. The main objective of this research was to determine the influence of Digital Signatures on word processor security against Macro executing environment and Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). This study sought to contribute to the development of an application software used to secure word processor applications and mitigate Macro and OLE based attacks. The developed application makes use of digital signatures since they are not easily forged and hence can be used to determine whether the embedded macros or OLE objects in a word document are from a trusted source. A detailed, systematic literature review was followed and design science was applied as the research design to develop the prototype application. The researcher collected data by conducting an experiment to determine how effective the developed application is in detecting and mitigating OLE and Macro attacks. The results from this experiment was used to determine the credibility of the developed application as well as to improve its efficacy. Convenience sampling was used due to time and budgetary constraints. Bivariate analysis was then used to analyze the data collected in order to determine how well the artifact provides a solution to the research problem. The results of this study is beneficial to state corporations, organizations as well as individuals since the InfoSec or IT department will have more confidence on the security of word processors among end users.