Liaison Gets MAD About Token Collisions

September 23, 2014 Alex Woodie

Liaison Technologies last week announced it’s been granted a US patent for its Multiple Active Domains (MAD) tokenization technology, which eliminates the risk of the same token being generated for different values, or what’s known as a token collision.

While it may sound somewhat whimsical, a token collision is no laughing matter. Token collisions can occur in large, geographically distributed organizations that have multiple data centers. When the same surrogate value, or token, is generated for different pieces of real data, a token collision has occurred, and the integrity of the data is lost.

Liaison developed MAD to enable tokens to be generated simultaneously at multiple locations without the possibility for the same tokens to be generated for different values.

MAD is a part of Liaison Protect, its data security product that includes encryption, tokenization, and encryption key management for a range of platforms, including IBM i, Windows, Linux, and Unix.

“This patent affirms our ongoing commitment to developing pioneering solutions that safeguard against security threats, while allowing enterprises to effectively manage and protect their data, and that of their customers,” Bruce Chen, chief technology officer at Liaison Technologies, says in a press release.

Liaison has been successful promoting tokenization for large companies trying to improve data security. Tokenization is particularly well-suited for large, distributed organizations, including those moving to centralized, private-cloud environments. Because sensitive data is no longer stored at remote sites, those remote sites no longer fall under the purview of some security requirements, such as PCI.

However, few organizations have centralized all of their data storage and processing environments into a single data center. With its MAD technology, Liaison is helping to ensure that tokenization continues to protect the integrity of data among the handful of mega-data centers that big enterprises have left.