How to separate a person's identity from his personal data?

Question

I'm writing an app which main purpose is to keep list of users purchases.

I would like to ensure that even I as a developer (or anyone with full access to the database) could not figure out how much money a particular person has spent or what he has bought.

I initially came up with the following scheme:

    --------------+------------+-----------
    user_hash     | item       | price
    --------------+------------+-----------
    a45cd654fe810 | Strip club |     400.00
    a45cd654fe810 | Ferrari    | 1510800.00
    54da2241211c2 | Beer       |       5.00
    54da2241211c2 | iPhone     |     399.00

• User logs in with username and password.
• From the password calculate user_hash (possibly with salting etc.).
• Use the hash to access users data with normal SQL-queries.

Given enough users, it should be almost impossible to tell how much money a particular user has spent by just knowing his name.

Is this a sensible thing to do, or am I completely foolish?

Answer 1

I'm afraid that if your application can link a person to its data, any developer/admin can.

The only thing you can do is making it harder to do the link, to slow the developer/admin, but if you make it harder to link users to data, you will make it harder for your server too.

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Idea based on @no idea :

You can have a classic user/password login to your application (hashed password, or whatever), and a special "pass" used to keep your data secure. This "pass" wouldn't be stored in your database.

When your client log in your application I would have to provide user/password/pass. The user/password is checked with the database, and the pass would be used to load/write data.

When you need to write data, you make a hash of your "username/pass" couple, and store it as a key linking your client to your data.

When you need to load data, you make a hash of your "username/pass" couple, and load every data matching this hash.

This way it's impossible to make a link between your data and your user.

In another hand, (as I said in a comment to @no) beware of collisions. Plus if your user write a bad "pass" you can't check it.

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Update : For the last part, I had another idea, you can store in your database a hash of your "pass/password" couple, this way you can check if your "pass" is okay.

Answer 2

The problem is that if someone already has full access to the database then it's just a matter of time before they link up the records to particular people. Somewhere in your database (or in the application itself) you will have to make the relation between the user and the items. If someone has full access, then they will have access to that mechanism.

There is absolutely no way of preventing this.

The reality is that by having full access we are in a position of trust. This means that the company managers have to trust that even though you can see the data, you will not act in any way on it. This is where little things like ethics come into play.

Now, that said, a lot of companies separate the development and production staff. The purpose is to remove Development from having direct contact with live (ie:real) data. This has a number of advantages with security and data reliability being at the top of the heap.

The only real drawback is that some developers believe they can't troubleshoot a problem without production access. However, this is simply not true.

Production staff then would be the only ones with access to the live servers. They will typically be vetted to a larger degree (criminal history and other background checks) that is commiserate with the type of data you have to protect.

The point of all this is that this is a personnel problem; and not one that can truly be solved with technical means.

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UPDATE

Others here seem to be missing a very important and vital piece of the puzzle. Namely, that the data is being entered into the system for a reason. That reason is almost universally so that it can be shared. In the case of an expense report, that data is entered so that accounting can know who to pay back.

Which means that the system, at some level, will have to match users and items without the data entry person (ie: a salesperson) being logged in.

And because that data has to be tied together without all parties involved standing there to type in a security code to "release" the data, then a DBA will absolutely be able to review the query logs to figure out who is who. And very easily I might add regardless of how many hash marks you want to throw into it. Triple DES won't save you either.

At the end of the day all you've done is make development harder with absolutely zero security benefit. I can't emphasize this enough: the only way to hide data from a dba would be for either 1. that data to only be accessible by the very person who entered it or 2. for it to not exist in the first place.

Regarding option 1, if the only person who can ever access it is the person who entered it.. well, there is no point for it to be in a corporate database.

Answer 3

Actually, there's a way you could possibly do what you're talking about...

You could have the user type his name and password into a form that runs a purely client-side script which generates a hash based on the name and pw. That hash is used as a unique id for the user, and is sent to the server. This way the server only knows the user by hash, not by name.

For this to work, though, the hash would have to be different from the normal password hash, and the user would be required to enter their name / password an additional time before the server would have any 'memory' of what that person bought.

The server could remember what the person bought for the duration of their session and then 'forget', because the database would contain no link between the user accounts and the sensitive info.

edit

In response to those who say hashing on the client is a security risk: It's not if you do it right. It should be assumed that a hash algorithm is known or knowable. To say otherwise amounts to "security through obscurity." Hashing doesn't involve any private keys, and dynamic hashes could be used to prevent tampering.

For example, you take a hash generator like this:

http://baagoe.com/en/RandomMusings/javascript/Mash.js

// From http://baagoe.com/en/RandomMusings/javascript/
// Johannes Baagoe <[email protected]>, 2010
function Mash() {
  var n = 0xefc8249d;

  var mash = function(data) {
    data = data.toString();
    for (var i = 0; i < data.length; i++) {
      n += data.charCodeAt(i);
      var h = 0.02519603282416938 * n;
      n = h >>> 0;
      h -= n;
      h *= n;
      n = h >>> 0;
      h -= n;
      n += h * 0x100000000; // 2^32
    }
    return (n >>> 0) * 2.3283064365386963e-10; // 2^-32
  };

  mash.version = 'Mash 0.9';
  return mash;
}

See how n changes, each time you hash a string you get something different.

• Hash the username+password using a normal hash algo. This will be the same as the key of the 'secret' table in the database, but will match nothing else in the database.
• Append the hashed pass to the username and hash it with the above algorithm.
• Base-16 encode var n and append it in the original hash with a delimiter character.

This will create a unique hash (will be different each time) which can be checked by the system against each column in the database. The system can be set up be allow a particular unique hash only once (say, once a year), preventing MITM attacks, and none of the user's information is passed across the wire. Unless I'm missing something, there is nothing insecure about this.

Answer 4

The only way to ensure that the data can't be connected to the person it belongs to is to not record the identity information in the first place (make everything anonymous). Doing this, however, would most likely make your app pointless. You can make this more difficult to do, but you can't make it impossible.

Storing user data and identifying information in separate databases (and possibly on separate servers) and linking the two with an ID number is probably the closest thing that you can do. This way, you have isolated the two data sets as much as possible. You still must retain that ID number as a link between them; otherwise, you would be unable to retrieve a user's data.

In addition, I wouldn't recommend using a hashed password as a unique identifier. When a user changes their password, you would then have to go through and update all of your databases to replace the old hashed password IDs with the new ones. It is usually much easier to use a unique ID that is not based on any of the user's information (to help ensure that it will stay static).

This ends up being a social problem, not a technological problem. The best solutions will be a social solution. After hardening your systems to guard against unauthorized access (hackers, etc), you will probably get better mileage working on establishing trust with your users and implementing a system of policies and procedures regarding data security. Include specific penalties for employees who misuse customer information. Since a single breach of customer trust is enough to ruin your reputation and drive all of your users away, the temptation of misusing this data by those with "top-level" access is less than you might think (since the collapse of the company usually outweighs any gain).

Answer 5

1. Create a users table with:
   1. user_id: an identity column (auto-generated id)
   2. username
   3. password: make sure it's hashed!
2. Create a product table like in your example:
   1. user_hash
   2. item
   3. price

The user_hash will be based off of user_id which never changes. Username and password are free to change as needed. When the user logs in, you compare username/password to get the user_id. You can send the user_hash back to the client for the duration of the session, or an encrypted/indirect version of the hash (could be a session ID, where the server stores the user_hash in the session).

Now you need a way to hash the user_id into user_hash and keep it protected.

1. If you do it client-side as @no suggested, the client needs to have user_id. Big security hole (especially if it's a web app), hash can be easily be tampered with and algorithm is freely available to the public.
2. You could have it as a function in the database. Bad idea, since the database has all the pieces to link the records.
3. For web sites or client/server apps you could have it on your server-side code. Much better, but then one developer has access to the hashing algorithm and data.
4. Have another developer write the hashing algorithm (which you don't have access to) and stick in on another server (which you also don't have access to) as a TCP/web service. Your server-side code would then pass the user ID and get a hash back. You wouldn't have the algorithm, but you can send all the user IDs through to get all their hashes back. Not a lot of benefits to #3, though the service could have logging and such to try to minimize the risk.
5. If it's simply a client-database app, you only have choices #1 and 2. I would strongly suggest adding another [business] layer that is server-side, separate from the database server.

Edit: This overlaps some of the previous points. Have 3 servers:

• Authentication server: Employee A has access. Maintains user table. Has web service (with encrypted communications) that takes user/password combination. Hashes password, looks up user_id in table, generates user_hash. This way you can't simply send all user_ids and get back the hashes. You have to have the password which isn't stored anywhere and is only available during authentication process.
• Main database server: Employee B has access. Only stores user_hash. No userid, no passwords. You can link the data using the user_hash, but the actual user info is somewhere else.
• Website server: Employee B has access. Gets login info, passes to authentication server, gets hash back, then disposes login info. Keeps hash in session for writing/querying to the database.

So Employee A has user_id, username, password and algorithm. Employee B has user_hash and data. Unless employee B modifies the website to store the raw user/password, he has no way of linking to the real users.

Using SQL profiling, Employee A would get user_id, username and password hash (since user_hash is generated later in code). Employee B would get user_hash and data.

Answer 6

Keep in mind that even without actually storing the person's identifying information anywhere, merely associating enough information all with the same key could allow you to figure out the identity of the person associated with certain information. For a simple example, you could call up the strip club and ask which customer drove a Ferrari.

For this reason, when you de-identify medical records (for use in research and such), you have to remove birthdays for people over 89 years old (because people that old are rare enough that a specific birthdate could point to a single person) and remove any geographic coding that specifies an area containing fewer than 20,000 people. (See http://privacy.med.miami.edu/glossary/xd_deidentified_health_info.htm)

AOL found out the hard way when they released search data that people can be identified just by knowing what searches are associated with an anonymous person. (See http://www.fi.muni.cz/kd/events/cikhaj-2007-jan/slides/kumpost.pdf)

Answer 7

It seems like you're right on track with this, but you're just over thinking it (or I simply don't understand it)

Write a function that builds a new string based on the input (which will be their username or something else that cant change overtime)

Use the returned string as a salt when building the user hash (again I would use the userID or username as an input for the hash builder because they wont change like the users' password or email)

Associate all user actions with the user hash.

No one with only database access can determine what the hell the user hashes mean. Even an attempt at brute forcing it by trying different seed, salt combinations will end up useless because the salt is determined as a variant of the username.

I think you've answered you own question with your initial post.