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Science/Tech See other Science/Tech Articles Title: I.B.M. Software Aims to Provide Security Without Sacrificing Privacy International Business Machines is introducing software today that is intended to let companies share and compare information with other companies or government agencies without identifying the people connected to it. Security specialists familiar with the technology say that, if truly effective, it could help tackle many security and privacy problems in handling personal information in fields like health care, financial services and national security. "There is real promise here," said Fred H. Cate, director of the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research at Indiana University. "But we'll have to see how well it works in all kinds of settings." The technology for anonymous data-matching has been under development by S.R.D. (Systems Research and Development), a start-up company that I.B.M. acquired this year. Much of the company's early financial backing came from In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm financed by the Central Intelligence Agency that invests in companies whose technologies have government security uses. S.R.D., now I.B.M.'s Entity Analytics unit, has worked for years on specialized software for quickly detecting relationships within vast storehouses of data. Its early market was in Las Vegas, where casinos used the company's technology to help prevent fraud or employee theft. The matching software might sift through databases of known felons, for example, to find any links to casino employees. By the late 1990's, United States intelligence agencies had discovered S.R.D. and the potential to use its technology for winnowing leads in pursuing terrorists or spies. After 9/11, the government's interest increased, and today most of the company's business comes from government contracts. The new product goes beyond finding relationships in different sets of data. The software, which I.B.M. calls DB2 Anonymous Resolution, enables companies or government agencies to share personal information on customers or citizens without identifying them. For example, say the government were looking for suspected terrorists on cruise ships. The government had a "watch list," but it did not want to give that list to a cruise line, fearing it might leak out. Similarly, the cruise lines did not want to hand over their entire customer lists to the government, out of privacy concerns. The I.B.M. software would convert data on a person into a string of seemingly random characters, using a technique known as a one-way hash function. No names, addresses or Social Security numbers, for example, would be embedded within the character string. The strings would be fed through a program to detect a matching pattern of characters. In the case of the cruise line and the government, an alert would be sent to both sides that a match had been detected. "But what you get is a message that there is a match on record Number 678 or whatever, and then the government can ask the cruise line for that specific record, not a whole passenger list," explained Jeff Jonas, the founder of S.R.D. and now chief scientist of I.B.M.'s Entity Analytics unit. "What you get is discovery without disclosure." To date, the software for anonymously sharing and matching data has been tested in a few projects, but I.B.M. is aiming for day-to-day use in several industries. In health care, for example, more secure and anonymous handling of patient information could alleviate privacy concerns in the shift to electronic health records, potentially increasing efficiency and reducing costs, analysts said. The technology, specialists noted, could also reduce the risk of identity theft, especially if personal data held by companies were made anonymous.
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