Ok, our data is on wikileaks…now what?

1. Your company, perhaps a health-care insurer, shares patient data with its partners
2. You have signed agreements that govern the use of that data and hold the partners responsible for its lifecycle and security
3. You hand over the data.
4. Much business value is generated from this partnership. End of story.

But, every CISO lives in fear of a possible ‘Step 5’:

A few years later, some of this data shows up on the internet. People’s names, addresses, treatments…

Ok, now what? Many things, but a key step is establishing culpability, by answering:

• Was this data leaked by one of the partners?
• If so, who?
• If it does look like a partner leaked it, can we prove it ?

In the document-sharing world, this type of problem is usually tackled with watermarking. But what about data? Data watermarking isn’t a thing. Well it wasn’t. But with Elten, it is.

Elten’s patent-pending Watermarking technology makes it so that you can provably identify the origin and owner of the data, even across copies on different systems

Let’s take a look at how this works.

1. As part of the sharing process, the data is run through a series of Randomized IsoSemantic Transforms. These have the effect of uniqifying the data without changing the semantics of it.
2. A Hashed fingerprint of the data is captured and stored in the FingerPrint Archive Db. This is extremely efficient in storage and you can store years worth of fingerprints at very low storage cost.
3. The data is now shared out with a partner. If the same data is shared with another party it goes through the same steps. Because of the Randomized IsoSemantic Transforms, the data that is shared out in the two cases is semantically the same, yet has different fingerprints
4. A leak happens. A snippet of the leaked data is matched against the fingerprint db.
5. A match there establishes with mathematically proveability who the responsible partner was.

Besides this doomsday use-case data watermarking has other uses, one being enforcement of data-licensing. To find out more visit www.elten.io. Be sure to try out the free version.