Bluefin Granted Patent for ShieldConex Data Security Technology

In films and documentaries of the past, bank robbers wore black, carried revolvers and entered the bank wearing a mask and a menacing demeanor. Today, the idea seems almost quaint: most “bank robbers” are digital thieves who subvert customer information online to steal money, or even company employees who raid the company’s data banks to retrieve and sell personal information. Call center employees in particular are often privy to customer’s most private information.

To prevent digital theft, many companies are taking extra steps to shield personally identifiable data from theft both external and internal. Payment and data security solutions provider Bluefin recently announced their first U.S. patent on the company’s ShieldConex data security platform for the tokenized encryption of Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Protected Health Information (PHI), and payment/ACH account data.

The company has been granted U.S patent 11,070,534, entitled, “Systems for Vaultless Tokenization and Encryption,” covering an iFrame service for collecting data, a tokenization service for (de)tokenizing and encrypting/decrypting data, and managing and creating templates for iFrame collection, (de)tokenization, and encryption/decryption.

ShieldConex uses both hardware-based encryption and vaultless tokenization to secure PII, PHI, cardholder data (CHD) and ACH account data entered online. All ShieldConex tokens are format preserving and the option exists to maintain portions of the tokenized data, such as the last four digits of a social security number, preserving the usefulness of the data in tokenized form while being database-friendly for developers. Additionally, the vaultless nature of the solution means customers always retain their data – ShieldConex tokenizes the sensitive data and returns it to the customer – and also eliminates issues of data sovereignty, while guaranteeing higher performance than legacy token vault-based solutions.

Companies can also directly connect to ShieldConex for online data encryption and tokenization via Bluefin’s API.

“There is more sensitive data being entered online than ever before, thanks in part to the pandemic,” said Ruston Miles, Bluefin’s founder. “E-commerce purchasing has risen dramatically, people are utilizing healthcare forms to enter everything from insurance information to their medical history, and as a result, hackers are going after the online channel. ShieldConex provides an easy to implement solution that protects any type of online data upon entry, in transit and in system storage.”

Edited by Luke Bellos