Also, there is no value in the answer matching your actual history, just in you being able to match the answer you previously provided. I would be tempted to pick ‘first girlfriend’ as the question and provide the name of the first associate at the institution in question, that you dealt with. This should be possible to remember - or to recover, in case of forgetting, and tied to the individual istitution, hence limiting the exposure. If you only supply a hash of that value, it is double-blinded.
If you REALLY want to get fancy, supply a hash of encryping the value plus a timestamp, hashed, with your private key - that way only you can convince yourself of the correctness of a specific value later. And that way you can update the answer by hashing the value with a new timestamp. But I think this is way beyond the level of justifiable complexity…
By the way, assuming that no human reads this before posting, the name and address above are fake, of course. I am, indeed, paranoid… But you know the old joke: just because you are, it does not mean they are not after you.
]]>Thanks for your post.
Kelly
]]>That’s a great point. Thank you. I certainly hope CountryWide uses hashing to store responses as one of many layers of security.
And yet, from a marketing and consumer perspective, I still think what they’re doing is a mistake. I think that consumers should be learning more and more how to protect their identity by not giving potentially sensitive data out, and they can start by thinking very critically about what data their financial services companies should be asking. I think, from the perspective of leveraging security as a major brand attribute, CountryWide should be leading their customers on this front, not encouraging them to give up unnecessarily personal data just because it’s requested.
Just my cranky opinion.
Thanks for the response.
/chris
]]>So on to the personal questions.. If they use hash functions to store the answers, you should be OK - because once they store it, it can’t be used by anyone for any reason, and can’t be recreated except by knowing the original input. BTW = a hash for yyyPWyyy is: BF0EF9995638B4BB57A537C13F7C011F
I hope this helps..
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