Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know about protecting PII data with zero exposure.
General Questions
Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is data that can be used to identify an entity, like name, national ID, passport number, phone number, date of birth, bank account number, address etc. It must be secured at all times.
The PII Data Vault is a cutting-edge Privacy Enhancing Technology (PET) platform designed for the secure processing of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) with zero data exposure. Unlike traditional security that only protects data at rest or in motion, PDV protects data in use (along with at rest and in motion) by allowing operations to be performed on fully encrypted datasets.
PII Data Vault de-risks infrastructure by protecting sensitive data and reducing the blast radius of potential breaches. It centralizes governance through granular access controls while ensuring regulatory compliance with data residency laws. By utilizing polymorphic encryption and tokenization, organizations can perform secure analytics and safely integrate with AI without exposing raw PII.
Among many other use cases, the vault can be used for secure data sharing for collaborating with third parties without leaking sensitive PII; verifying identities without exposing raw documents or data; using real-time, tokenized data for testing instead of vulnerable "massaged" samples.
PII Data Vault is industry-agnostic. Wherever firms deal with customer data, PDV is useful. It is designed for scale and is applicable for banks, insurance providers, financial institutes, retailers, government departments, telecoms, credit bureaus and more.
Technology & Security
Traditional encryption requires data to be decrypted (exposed) before it can be searched or processed. Searchable Encryption (and specifically our proprietary Hashcryption) allows the Vault to compare numeric tokens and run complex queries without ever revealing the plain text.
Hashcryption is a unique, one-way, irreversible 5-stage polymorphic algorithm (VEARE: Vectorized, Encoded, Anonymized, Randomized Encryption). It converts PII elements into numeric tokens that can be compared for similarity based on phonetics and pattern recognition.
Yes. Unlike standard PET solutions that often struggle with non-numeric data, our advanced Hashcryption tokens allow for fuzzy matching on names and date elements even while encrypted.
Compliance & Data Residency
PII Data Vault is built to support modern data protection and privacy requirements, including:
- DPDP (India), GDPR, PDPA, and GCC privacy frameworks
- PCI data such as credit and debit card numbers
- Sensitive PII like national IDs, contact details, and financial information
- Protected Health Information (PHI) such as patient and billing data
It helps organizations demonstrate privacy-by-design, minimal exposure, and strong audit controls.
The PII Data Vault helps you comply with laws like DPDP Act, PDPA, And GDPR by:
- Data Minimization: Ensuring raw PII is never exposed during processing.
- Data Residency: Keeping PII within national boundaries while still allowing global processing through encrypted tokens.
- Audit-Ready Logs: Providing full visibility and controlled access to sensitive identifiers.
The PII Data Vault simplifies audits by centralizing sensitive identifiers in a single, secure location, effectively reducing the audit surface area across your enterprise. So, there is centralized governance. Instead of auditing PII across dozens of scattered databases and applications, auditors only need to verify the security controls of the central vault.
PDV also features built-in role-based access and logs, providing a clear and enforceable trail of who accessed sensitive data and why. Further, by isolating PII and replacing it with non-sensitive tokens, you can demonstrate privacy-by-design to regulators, which is a core requirement of modern data protection laws.
Yes, PDV utilizes technologies such as SHA3 and AES 256, which are designed to withstand modern and future cryptographic threats.
Yes, significantly.
The PII Data Vault is designed for Zero Data Exposure, ensuring that even if a network or database is compromised, the sensitive information remains protected.
Because PDV uses one-way irreversible Hashcryption and tokenization, any data exfiltrated during a breach is useless to unauthorized parties, as the attacker can only get tokens. This mitigates fines.
Further, the vault protects data while it is being processed, closing the gap where most high-risk exposures occur.
Integration & Performance
Yes. PII Data Vault is designed to integrate with existing applications, databases, and workflows via REST API calls, table-level integration, or file integration.
PDV is database-agnostic and OS-independent, meaning it complements rather than replaces your current stack.
It supports format-preserving encryption and tokenization, so downstream systems continue to function as expected. Most organizations deploy it without re-platforming or redesigning their core systems.
No. PII Data Vault is built for population-scale performance. In benchmark tests with 50 million records, fuzzy searches on names and IDs averaged between 9 and 24 milliseconds.
PDV is highly flexible and supports multi-cloud, hybrid, and on-premise deployments to meet your specific security requirements.
