Liaison Enables More Flexibility in Tokenization Solution

September 24, 2013 Alex Woodie

Customers who adopt the latest format-preserving tokenization software from Liaison Technologies will have more flexibility to adapt tokens to different types of data they want to encrypt, the company announced this month.

Liaison sells an all-inclusive data security product called Liaison Protect that includes encryption, tokenization, and encryption key management for a range of platforms, including IBM i, Windows, Linux, and Unix.

Most organizations are probably familiar with the types of encryption solutions that are available on the market. What makes Liaison Protect unique is that it also includes tokenization, which refers to the process of replacing sensitive data in databases with meaningless surrogate values, or tokens. When the real data value is required, the application submits the token, and retrieves the encrypted value from a central database.

While this approach is good for reducing the risks associated with storing sensitive data and minimizing the scope of audits for PCI and other regulations, it does introduce another level of complexity into the enterprise, in particular around the tokenization formats used. With Liaison Protect version 2.4, the company hopes to give customers more flexibility in how their tokenized data is stored.

According to Liaison, the new extensibility option allows custom protection strategies to be created and quickly plugged into Liaison Token Manager to support new token formats for a variety of data, such as personally identifiable information (PII), protected health information (PHI), and payment card industry (PCI) data. This approach reduces redundancy and bolsters efficiency, the company says.

The new extensibility features enables Liaison Protect customers to “both prevent security breaches of sensitive information, and support many new regulations worldwide aimed at reducing identity theft and consumer fraud,” says Robert Fox, vice president of application development at Liaion Technologies.

The core Liaison Protect product runs on multiple platforms, including IBM i, Unix, Windows, and Linux. In IBM i environments, customers have two options for running the Token Manager component, including as a Java program running in PASE for IBM i-only environments, or, if multiple platforms are being protected (as is often the case), Liaison supports running Token Manager on an open platform and using a special connector to handle integration with Protect running on IBM i.