Data masking Techniques in Mainframe.

[BobThomas]

Hi,

Does someone have experience with data masking Techniques in Mainframes and can someone please guide in general on this.

Thanks,

[Robert Sample]

The first question is what are you considering "data masking"? I've seen various uses for the term:
- a reversible change in a field value to hide the actual data (this is NOT PCI-compliant, by the way)
- encryption of a field value before writing the record and decryption upon reading (may be PCI-compliant, depending on the encryption method)
- a non-reversible change in a field value to hide the actual data

Most of the time I've been involved in data masking, it is for PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliance, and PCI compliance requires a lot more than mere data masking. However, in general data masking is implemented in an application and the program(s) that read / write data records usually have some common subroutine to convert the field values that are to be masked (mask before write, unmask after read). This is difficult to retrofit into an application due to the complexity, but it can be done.

[BobThomas]

By data making I meant (back than and today too) getting the production data to test region and converting the merchant account number to an equivalent number.

[enrico-sorichetti]

By data making I meant (back than and today too) getting the production data to test region and converting the merchant account number to an equivalent number.

drop the condescending tone please , we do not need to taught what data masking is

Robert was asking about the environment and the legal constraints in order to provide a better answer

it is not that simple ...

uniqueness is not a problem ...
the real problems ( for a home grown solution ) are
monotocity ==> keep the same sequence of the original data and
spread the masking on all the datasets/databases/tables


it is odd to ask for help for such a complex issue on a forum

...
and anyway data masking approach and techniques do not generally depend on the platform until You deal with the lowly technicalities

[BobThomas]

It is an old topic of mine and the requirement was partially dropped that time. But we made use of Optim tool. And couple of online references helped me. Two of them which I saved are here for reference:

http://www.ibmbigdatahub.com/blog/imple ... ata-part-1
http://www.ibmbigdatahub.com/blog/imple ... ata-part-2