IBM to Provide Security w/o Sacrificing Privacy Using Hash Functions

[Alex L. Mauer]

Florian Weimer wrote:
> * Sean C.:
>
>
>>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.
>
>
> For most applications, this is just a speed bump because the search
> space is rather small.  It's even worse for the no-fly list because
> you have to apply some data reduction first (think SOUNDEX): a lot of
> the names on them have varying transliteration.

Can you expand on this?

How could the Name/address/ssn be retrieved from a hash of the same?

How would data reduction be necessary?  Couldn't everything be
represented in Unicode?  Of course, that doesn't solve the
transliteration problem, but then again it's no different than the
status quo in that respect ("Alex Mauer" != "Aleks Mauer")

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