document characteristic

A set of observable, machine-inspectable attributes of a document object — such as file type, structure, metadata, embedded data types, or content patterns — that boundary protection and content-inspection mechanisms use as decision criteria to permit, block, or redirect information flows. Flow control in information security is based on characteristics of the information or the information path, and enforcement occurs in boundary protection devices that can provide a message-filtering capability based on message content — for example, by implementing keyword searches or using document characteristics. Organizations employ information flow control policies and enforcement mechanisms to control the flow of information between designated sources and destinations, with flow control based on the characteristics of the information and/or the information path. In practice, the term names the content-side analogue to packet-header attributes: where a firewall filters on IP header fields, a content-inspection gateway filters on document-level signals such as format signatures, embedded macros, or sensitive-data patterns.

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