Secure Information Discovery between Public Security Authorities Using a New Pseudonymization Approach

Secure information discovery between independent security authorities is a major challenge in times when crime organizations co-operate more and more across national borders. Isolated databases, security, and privacy regulations as well as a lack of trust often hinder an efficient information exchange between security authorities. E.g., national police authorities of the 27 Member States of the European Union (EU) must use a manual process to send separate secure emails to each other if they need to identify if a suspect is known to the other police authority. To overcome these obstacles a distributed semi-automated hit-/no hit-system for secure information discovery between federated organizations has been developed. This system uses a Bloom-filter based pseudonymization allowing for similarity searches between pseudonyms. The system has been tested in a pilot phase of the European Police Records Index System (EPRIS) which will become the basis for the new regulation for automated data exchange for police cooperation in the EU. This paper describes the approach and the preliminary results of the pilotphase.