March 9, 2016
Hitachi Develops Technology to Anonymize Encrypted Personal Data
Hitachi, Ltd. announced the development of technology to securely anonymize encrypted personal data. Anonymization converts information related to individuals, personal information, to a form which cannot identify the individual. This newly developed technology which conducts anonymization in a more secure manner will be applied to respond to the expected increase in market needs for anonymized personal data resulting from the revision of the Japanese legislation on the Protection of Personal Information in September 2015.
The use of cloud computing is becoming increasingly popular in big data analytics, as it allows flexibility in computing processing power. In handling sensitive data such as personal information, however, even greater security is required. Technology is being developed for practical application that encrypts data on the cloud in a form which cannot be easily decrypted by third parties but allows search and analytics to be conducted. On the other hand, k-anonymization technology is a well-known technology for anonymizing personal data but with conventional technology, pre-encrypted data cannot be directly anonymized and had to be decrypted first for anonymization, thus raising security issues.
To enhance security in the anonymization of personal data, Hitachi has developed technology to encrypt personal data and enable k-anonymization of the encrypted data on the cloud.
Overview of Technology Developed
