Security through Obscurity

“Security through Obscurity” is a term often used to refer to security provided by keeping details of a system secret, or by making a system so obtuse that it is difficult to determine how it works, thus hiding its vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, I believe that there is also an application of this term to the need of identifying and tracking the important information hidden in the mountains of digital data generated each day.

While technology has provided several good paradigms for dealing with structured data (i.e. data that is structured in such a way to be easily decomposed into pre-defined fields), it has not kept pace with unstructured data, such as emails, blogs, web site content, etc. Thus, critical information is often kept “secret” through the obscurity of the sheer volume of data one must process, often manually, to reveal this information.

In response to this challenge, Digital Reasoning Systems, Inc has developed a comprehensive set of analytical tools packaged into product called Synthesys^® that essentially decomposes unstructured text into meaningful information easily understood and manipulated by a user.

This technology is based on the premise that there is order inherent in all languages that can be discovered and mathematically modeled. This has led to the development of our advanced data analytics and knowledge abstraction for unstructured data, based on a distinctive, patented mathematical approach to natural language processing.

For a better understanding of Synthesys^® and its capabilities, a down-loadable white paper (Synthesys – Technology Overview) providing a high-level overview can be found here.