In such cases, we can leverage one of the SQL views which SQL Server provides to have an overview on which columns, dynamic data masking has been applied. Sometimes, it is possible that you are already working on a database but you’re not aware of the data is already masked or not. If you select data from the same table as the original user, you’ll still be able to see the actual data and no masked data at all.įigure 9 – No Masked Data Check columns with Dynamic Data Masking As already explained earlier, this feature doesn’t entirely encrypt a column, instead, it just masks the characters of that column. This is useful in providing a security layer dynamically while the underlying data remains the same.
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So far, we have explored how to implement the various functions of Dynamic Data Masking in SQL Server and we have seen that the data is masked and only a portion of the actual data is visible to the user. You can execute the script below and set up the dataset on your local.ĪLTER COLUMN VARCHAR ( 30 ) MASKED WITH ( FUNCTION = 'email()' ) Let us first set up our dataset with which we will be performing all the operations from now on. Server 2016, but this feature is also available and can be used any versions higher than SQL Server 2016, including For the purpose of this article, I’m using SQL Now that we have some basic information about dynamic data masking and the various functions for applying the masking, let us learn how we can implement the same in SQL Server. You can see an illustration in the figure below.įigure 4 – Email Masking Implementing Dynamic Data Masking The masked column returns the first character of the email as-is and masks the remaining characters of the field. It is not used to mask character or numeric fields. This function is specifically used to mask if the column contains an email address. Partial Masking column has few characters from the beginning and end visible, but the characters in the middle have been masked.įigure 3 – Partial Data Masking Email Data Masking For example, if you see the figure below, the Partial Data Masking is also like the one we understood above, except this function accepts a parameter from the user to define how many characters from the columns should be masked. The number of “X” depends on the length of the data in the column.įigure 2 – Default Data Masking Partial Data Masking The default masking just replaces a few characters with “XXXX” from the data value.
The same goes for columns which are of numeric data type and other columns with date type data type. This is a type of data masking that is applied automatically by the database engine based on the column data type.įor example, if the data type of a column is a string (text, ntext, char, nchar, varchar, nvarchar), then this is the default masking that will be applied.
SQL Server already comes with some pre-defined mask functions that we can use while defining dynamic data masking in However, the official documentation suggests that it is only primary security and shouldīe used with other features such as Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) or Row Level Security (RLS). As the company was governed under GDPR laws, I requested the team to mask the sensitive information and then transfer the data so that we may continue with the development work.Īn important point to note here is that Dynamic Data Masking is just a security feature that allows masking on theĭatabase layer only. If this masked representation is provided, it is not an easy task to make up the actual account number from that.Ī few weeks back, I was working with one of my customers and we had a few requirements where I had to have access to the client’s data. This is done essentially to provide a secure way to represent any confidential information.
If you notice the illustration above, you can see on the left hand is the actual account numbers and on the right-hand, the account numbers are displayed, however, some of the numbers are replaced by a specific character, An example of such a use case may be when a contact center representative is tasked to help a bank customer with their financial information, in such cases only a masked version of the account number or the credit card number is visible to the representative. Everyone expects their data to be protected as their own asset and like to treat it with the highest efficiency possible.ĭynamic Data Masking protects underlying data in SQL Server by applying masking function dynamically such that the end-users don’t get to see the actual data, but instead sees a masked version of the data. In an ever-growingĭigital era, the security of ones’ data has become one of the most important and expensive deals. As it goes by the name,ĭynamic Data Masking is one of the security features that was introduced in SQL Server 2016.
In this article, I’m going to explain the Dynamic Data Masking feature in SQL Server.
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