DEA-C01 Question 502
Select 2Your organization needs to share a dataset containing customer information with a third-party analytics service. To comply with privacy regulations, customer names and email addresses must be anonymized. The solution should also ensure that anonymized data is resistant to re-identification attacks. Which combination of approaches should you use to achieve this goal?
- A
Use deterministic encryption with a shared key to mask customer names and email addresses.
- B
Apply data masking techniques and add random key salting for anonymized fields.
- C
Use hashing algorithms with a salt to anonymize customer names and email addresses.
- D
Perform format-preserving encryption on sensitive fields to ensure compatibility with the analytics service.
- E
Replace customer names and email addresses with random pseudonyms without using a key or salt.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answers: B, C
Explanation
To anonymize sensitive data such as customer names and email addresses while ensuring resistance to re-identification, you should use hashing with a salt or masking techniques combined with key salting. These approaches introduce randomness and prevent predictable patterns, making it computationally difficult to reverse-engineer or identify individuals from the anonymized dataset.
- A. Incorrect.
Deterministic encryption with a shared key could still allow patterns to be identified, making the data vulnerable to re-identification. This approach does not satisfy the goal of strong anonymization.
- B. Correct.
Data masking combined with key salting ensures that anonymized data is resistant to re-identification attacks, as the salt introduces randomness and prevents predictable patterns.
- C. Correct.
Hashing algorithms with a salt provide a strong anonymization mechanism by making it computationally infeasible to reverse-engineer the original data. This approach is resistant to re-identification attacks.
- D. Incorrect.
Format-preserving encryption does not anonymize the data but rather encrypts it while maintaining its format. This does not meet the requirement for anonymization.
- E. Incorrect.
Replacing sensitive fields with random pseudonyms without using a key or salt may lead to incomplete anonymization, as the process lacks cryptographic guarantees and could lead to re-identification under certain circumstances.