Briefs

12/13/04; Vol. 23 No. 34, GCN.com, By William Jackson

Sharing data among government agencies is easier said than done. Many groups want or need to protect the confidentiality of their information, meaning they’d like a secure way of letting other agencies know what data they have without showing them the actual data.

Systems Research and Development of Las Vegas, a developer of identity recognition software, has come up with a scheme to let organizations share and compare data without compromising privacy.

SRD’s Anonymous Entity Resolution software, dubbed Anna, uses a hashing algorithm to create a unique identifier for each piece of personal data in a file. Once hashed, the data is unrecognizable except by software and can’t be cracked. Hashed identifiers from different databases can then be compared for matches without revealing the identity of the underlying individual.

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