Creating personally identifiable honeytokens

Abstract

In this paper, a method for creating digital honeytokens consisting of personal information such as names, addresses, telephone numbers and social security numbers is designed and evaluated. We show that these honeytokens can add to the security of digital data by allowing better identification of individuals who are misusing or inappropriately copying personally identifying information. No program currently exists publically to create personally identifying honeytokens; we will show how the design we've proposed will fill this void and be another good tool for the computer security engineer and a vast improvement over previous naïve and manual methods of generating fake identifying information. The main contribution of this work is a new and innovative program to produce PII honeytokens, a description of where they can be deployed, and an analysis that shows they appear realistic. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010.