5 ms·

I think it's an extreme overstep as well, but I do believe it's possible the data is anonymous. A secure hash of the fields you were talking about would make it

I think it's an extreme overstep as well, but I do believe it's possible the data is anonymous. A secure hash of the fields you were talking about would make it possible to lookup when given the correct information, but impossible to reverse. Of course, it's just as likely, this already being a government program and a massive overreach at that, that your identifying data is stored in plain text. I just wanted to throw out it's possible it's not.

avn2109 8y ago
Realistically, the odds are vanishingly small that various security-themed agencies aren't already ingesting all the DNA data. This is a treasure trove in the eyes of a police state.
- lostlogin 8y ago
  After the Golden State Killer episode, it’s now probably seen as cheaper for them to just contact companies like 23andme.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    I’m surprised 23andme doesn’t start marketing directly to law enforcement agencies, to cast a wider net then CODIS familial searches would.
fatratchet 8y ago
I don't think so, even if it was only stored that way the government will still have (name, dob, hospital) info for most citizens saved in some db/list making it easy to recreate the link back to the real person with pretty high accuracy I would assume.
Sir_Substance 8y ago
>A secure hash of the fields you were talking about would make it possible to lookup when given the correct information, but impossible to reverse. Think about the inputs of the mechanism you just described though. Presumably the goal of the "secure hash" is to prevent government workers from grabbing samples of specific people to do whatever with, so let's break it down. To calculate this hash you apparently need: 1. The name. If you're going after a specific persons sample, you already know this. 2. The date of birth. I don't know when this program started, but if you're alive today you definitely aren't more than 43,830 days old (365.25 * 120). 3. The hospital. I have no idea how many hospitals exist or have existed in California, but lets say there's been 100,000. So the total number of possible hashes given only the name is 4,383,000,000. Sure, you could salt it as well, but the people we're trying to defend from have access to the DB and thus the salt, so we gain nothing from that. Here's some hashcat benchmarks: https://gist.github.com/epixoip/a83d38f412b4737e99bbef804a270c40 https://gist.github.com/epixoip/a83d38f412b4737e99bbef804a27... Looks like 1000MH/s is a reasonable rate to be able to process sha-512 hashes, so according to that benchmark you should be able to generate the complete rainbow table in about...4 seconds. It's probably longer given drive speeds and such, I've never actually tried to do what I'm describing, but it does seem like a less-than-one-work-shift process to calculate the hash of a specific person on commodity hardware if that's the only three inputs required. If that's the case, hashing it hasn't made it anonymous.
mwilliaams 8y ago
> a secure hash of the fields Possible, but unlikely, given that this is the government we're talking about. Also, even if they were hashed like that, I just gave them that identifying information as part of the destruction request.

avn2109 8y ago

Realistically, the odds are vanishingly small that various security-themed agencies aren't already ingesting all the DNA data. This is a treasure trove in the eyes of a police state.

lostlogin 8y ago
After the Golden State Killer episode, it’s now probably seen as cheaper for them to just contact companies like 23andme.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  I’m surprised 23andme doesn’t start marketing directly to law enforcement agencies, to cast a wider net then CODIS familial searches would.

fatratchet 8y ago

I don't think so, even if it was only stored that way the government will still have (name, dob, hospital) info for most citizens saved in some db/list making it easy to recreate the link back to the real person with pretty high accuracy I would assume.

Sir_Substance 8y ago

>A secure hash of the fields you were talking about would make it possible to lookup when given the correct information, but impossible to reverse. Think about the inputs of the mechanism you just described though. Presumably the goal of the "secure hash" is to prevent government workers from grabbing samples of specific people to do whatever with, so let's break it down. To calculate this hash you apparently need: 1. The name. If you're going after a specific persons sample, you already know this. 2. The date of birth. I don't know when this program started, but if you're alive today you definitely aren't more than 43,830 days old (365.25 * 120). 3. The hospital. I have no idea how many hospitals exist or have existed in California, but lets say there's been 100,000. So the total number of possible hashes given only the name is 4,383,000,000. Sure, you could salt it as well, but the people we're trying to defend from have access to the DB and thus the salt, so we gain nothing from that. Here's some hashcat benchmarks: https://gist.github.com/epixoip/a83d38f412b4737e99bbef804a270c40 https://gist.github.com/epixoip/a83d38f412b4737e99bbef804a27... Looks like 1000MH/s is a reasonable rate to be able to process sha-512 hashes, so according to that benchmark you should be able to generate the complete rainbow table in about...4 seconds. It's probably longer given drive speeds and such, I've never actually tried to do what I'm describing, but it does seem like a less-than-one-work-shift process to calculate the hash of a specific person on commodity hardware if that's the only three inputs required. If that's the case, hashing it hasn't made it anonymous.

mwilliaams 8y ago

> a secure hash of the fields Possible, but unlikely, given that this is the government we're talking about. Also, even if they were hashed like that, I just gave them that identifying information as part of the destruction request.