New Anonymization and Pseudonymization Techniques to be Presented by ERUCES

Jon-Michael C. Brook, ERUCES' Vice President of Global Security Solutions & Sales, will present at the 2008 HOPE Conference in July. Mr. Brook, giving a talk entitled "Pseudonymization Methodologies: Personal Liberty vs. the Greater Good", provide a market survey, will discuss the various methods for hiding personal information within data sets, ways to reconstruct those data and demonstrate several example application scenarios.

Data sets from health care providers to financial services companies include Personally Identifiable Information (PII) such as names, Social Security Numbers or dates of birth. Pseudonymization, generically referred to as anonymization, replaces PII with mathematically generated aliases. With each presenting strengths and weaknesses, the mathematical methods for generating these aliases are vendor specific.

Mr. Brook declared: "Pseudonymization will be the next hot topic in data mining." He continued: "Health care researchers may present skewed results if they rely on improperly anonymized data. Terrorist watchlists may invade US citizens' privacy if the TSA doesn't anonymize, and may not catch the bad guys if they do. And what happens when the CDC receives five reports of the Avian Flu - is that one individual visiting five hospitals? Indeed, finding 'information' within data sets with some of the anonymization techniques may be far outside the design of those systems."

ERUCES' Vice President of Software Development, Mr. Oggy Vasic, stated: "The ERUCES' Key Server provides fast encryption key access, and since the Tricryption architecture does not store keys with the data, anonymization of database sets works quite well." He added: "We expect this to be a well attended talk that may open a few eyes as to how Data Leakage may occur when anonymization systems are not properly devised. It will also demonstrate, when architected properly, how anonymization protects Personally Identifiable Information."

As a place to share new technology, privacy topics, security methods and network technologies, the 2600 Group created the HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) Conference in 1994. The conference is held every two years in New York City. Keynote speeches by senior editor for Newsweek Steven Levy, computer security consultant Kevin Mitnick and privacy expert Steven Rambam are included in this year's conference.