Within two years, most of today’s cybersecurity technologies will be obsolete.
Since the beginning of 2016, hackers have stolen more than 8 billion records — more than double the two previous years combined — and that doesn’t account for unreported intrusions.
The current system of patches, firewalls and blacklists isn’t working. It’s no match for the organized crime rings that carry out more than 80 percent of attacks. These groups systematically probe for weaknesses, share tools and techniques, and continually develop countermeasures for even today’s most advanced security technologies.
The best course of action is to constantly innovate.
One method is known as fully homomorphic encryption, which makes it possible to crunch data while its encrypted, meaning the data used never yields any private information. While this could be a great solution, it’s still a few years away from being practical because of processing speed.
Another innovation is called pseudonymization, or if that is a mouthful, desensitized data. The idea is simple, even obvious — transform data so it looks and behaves like the real data, but it’s not.
For the past several years, IBM cryptographers in Zurich have been developing this technology and it is commercialized under the name of the IBM High Assurance Desensitization Engine.
The timing for the availability of this technology couldn’t be better in light of the recent data privacy leaks and the need to meet the EU’s upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This regulation seeks to create a harmonized data protection law framework across the EU which imposes strict rules on those hosting, moving and processing this data anywhere in the world.
The pseudo engine that could
The technology works by creating replicas of production data which are significantly less sensitive than the original data, but maintain all the desired characteristics needed for further use. Put simply, the data maintains its utility while also being privacy friendly.
The IBM tokenization solution works efficiently with different database technologies, provides consistent data across comprehensive application landscapes, includes advanced security functionality and scales to very large volumes (production size). These tokenized replicas can be used for various activities such as performing data analytics, protecting internal confidentiality and supporting regulatory compliance or testing.
In fact, today we are announcing that Rabobank, the Dutch multi-national bank and financial services company, is successfully using the technology. It’s being used for both GDPR compliance and providing data for performance testing for the development of new innovative technologies and services such as mobile apps and payment solutions.
This is what Peter Claassen, Delivery Manager Radical Automation of Rabobank, said publically about the use application of the technology:
“It’s critical for our DevOps team to use data which is as close as possible to production during the testing phase, so when we go live, we are confident that our services will perform. Being able to test and iterate using pseudonymized data is going to unleash new innovations from our DevOps team bringing even more security, innovation and convenience to our clients.”
What Rabobank is referring to is not uncommon. In a world where data is considered a natural resource, many enterprises use production data that includes personal client data for more than their primary purpose.
