Data Obfuscation: A Complete Guide - Voxco (2024)

FAQs

What is the data obfuscation process? ›

Data obfuscation is the process of replacing sensitive information with data that looks like real production information, making it useless to malicious actors.

Three of the most common techniques used to obfuscate data are encryption, tokenization, and data masking. Encryption, tokenization, and data masking work in different ways. Encryption and tokenization are reversible in that the original values can be derived from the obfuscated data.

In the Data Sources section, click Data Obfuscation Management. To create a new profile, click Add and type a unique name and description for the profile.

Challenges of Data Obfuscation

Encryption can obfuscate structured and unstructured data, but encrypted data is difficult to query and analyze. Tokenization becomes increasingly difficult to secure to scale as the amount of data increases. Threat actors also use data obfuscation maliciously.

Data obfuscation is often used interchangeably with data masking. Data obfuscation scrambles data to anonymize it.

PII can be obfuscated by either nullifying or masking. PII is nullified when its value is returned null. PII is masked when a portion of its value is returned with placeholder characters, such as 'XXXXXXX-3213' as a return value for an account number.

Data anonymization is also known as "data obfuscation," "data masking," or "data de-identification." It can be contrasted with de-anonymization, which are techniques used in data mining that attempt to re-identify encrypted or obscured information.

Obfuscation rule actions define what attributes to look at, what text to obfuscate, and how to obfuscate (either by masking or hashing). Obfuscation expressions are named regular expressions identifying what text to obfuscate. Masking completely removes information, replacing it with X characters.

Encryption: This is a method for controlling access to data. Obfuscation: This is a method for making something harder to see or understand.

Enhance Security: By making your software's code difficult to read and comprehend, obfuscation can help to protect against hacking attempts and enhance the application's file security. Avoid Code Tampering: Obfuscation can help detract unauthorized code alteration by making it harder to understand.

Why is data obfuscation important? ›

Data obfuscation is an important technique for protecting sensitive data from unauthorized access. By transforming data into a format that is not easily recognizable or understandable, data obfuscation can help maintain the privacy and confidentiality of sensitive data.

Compression, encryption, and encoding are some of the most common obfuscation methods used by threat actors. Multiple methods are often used in tandem to evade a wider variety of cybersecurity tools at the initial point of intrusion.

Obfuscation analysis

It is a very difficult and often time-consuming process to reverse engineer a compiler-generated code, especially as things gets even worse when machine code is in encrypted or obfuscated form.

The goal of data obfuscation is to make it impossible for unauthorized users to attribute the data, reducing the risk of unauthorized access or misuse. It can take various forms, such as encryption, tokenization, data masking, and data scrambling.

Obfuscation means to make something difficult to understand. Programming code is often obfuscated to protect intellectual property or trade secrets, and to prevent an attacker from reverse engineering a proprietary software program. Encrypting some or all of a program's code is one obfuscation method.

Essentially, data obfuscation is a form of data masking that works by replacing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) with realistic, but fake, data. Although the data seems like it comes straight from production, it's basically useless to unauthorized individuals.

Encryption is the process of converting data into an unusable form and does not itself stop hacking or data theft. Instead, it prevents stolen content from being used, since the hacker or thief cannot see it in plaintext format.