IBM Mainframe Forum

Hi,

Can we do encryption through fileaid ?

Thanks ,
Gautham

What does the file-aid manual/help say?

Hello,

Why does someone believe encryption is needed? I ask because most of the time it is not or the request is too generic.

What are you trying to accomplish?

I suspect that you want to use encryption to "hide" data that is to be transferred t osome other system. Why not simply compress the file with a password and then decompress it on the receiving end?

Hi ,

My actual requirement is :
* to transfer the data from production to development region
* the development region should contain encrypted data . (for eg ssn numbers should be encrypted in dev region )

Thats why i asked whether we have any options in fileaid .

Gautham

That's not encryption.

You need to rather make them readable but not the correct data.

I wonder why such <important> issues are taken so lightly to rely on answers from a forum!

depending on the organization core business the issue is amazingly complex,
the proper term is data obfuscation, and is a stringent requirement for (for example) financial organization
when dealing with production data transferred to the test environments and the related development outsourcing

any answer that the TS might get on a forum apart a do not do it by Yourself will be most likely <wrong>,
dealing with such an issue is usually the object of an hefty consultancy,
ant the organization willingness to spend money on consultants and products
-- the CEO will most likely be happy to sign the contracts because of his/her legal liabilities
concerning the safeguard of personal data

To add to the other responses, encryption is probably not even the right way to go, anyway. SSN is a 9-digit NUMERIC value in the U.S. If you encrypt it, depending upon the algorithm used, you may get more -- or less - than 9 character, and those characters (however many they are) are guaranteed to be non-numeric since encryption uses the entire collating sequence. So you've changed a 9-digit number into an alphanumeric field of some length -- which implies, at the least, that the processing logic used to handle the 9-digit number on your production system most likely will have to be rewritten to handle the encrypted data. This could require anything from changing a program or two, through complete system rewrite, depening upon the application and how much it relies upon the 9-digit and numeric aspects of SSN.