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By Cara Garretson
IBM is developing a new masking technology that leverages optical character recognition in hopes of stopping unauthorized access to confidential data.
Called Masking Gateway for Enterprises, or MAGEN, this technology is under development at IBM's Research & Development Labs in Israel. While IBM hasn't said when this prototype might be commercialized as a product, the problem that the company is attempting to solve is very real: How does a corporation give employees, partners, and contractors the information they need to get their jobs done without revealing personal or financial information that should be kept confidential in the process?
MAGEN, which means both "shield" and "protection" in Hebrew, tries to solve the problem by using optical character recognition and screen scraping to pinpoint, and then cover up, confidential information. The technology analyzes each piece of data before it is displayed on a computer screen to determine if the information is confidential, then masks the sensitive data from the user, according to IBM.
The technology in essence treats the computer screen as a picture, using optical character recognition to flag those pieces of data that had been previously identified as confidential. It then places a data `mask' over the confidential information without editing, copying, or changing the data itself, IBM says.
While seemingly straightforward, the issue of blocking sensitive data from unauthorized access becomes complex when that data is "in motion," meaning being e-mailed, printed, posted on the Web, or saved to external media by different people. IBM is developing MAGEN to be used with any application, operating system, or communication protocol, so that companies can have one simple way of protecting confidential data, the company says. MAGEN also works with any format of data and can be adjusted to different levels of authorization, they say.
IBM offers the example of a health insurance company that outsources to a third-party vendor claims processing for medical and dental patients, as well as all related e-mail correspondence with these patients. The customer service representatives at the claims processing company need to access patient records in order to help answer inquiries, but by law those patients' records can't be shared with a third party.
In this case, MAGEN would mask all of a patient's private information so that the customer service representatives couldn't access that data, IBM says. Because MAGEN uses optical character recognition, it can mask sensitive data without making any changes to the client application.
IBM says MAGEN can work in any environment where screen images are delivered.
Security experts recommend that any company dealing in personal or confidential information deploy some sort of data-loss protection product or service to cut down on the unauthorized access of data that can lead to breaches. According to a study by Verizon Business, there were 90 confirmed data breaches in 2008, totaling 285 million compromised records. Of those 90 breaches, 87 percent were "considered avoidable through simple or intermediate controls," according to Verizon Business.
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