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TAPAnonymizer Overview

Anonymizing TAP files refers to the process of removing sensitive information from a TAP file. The most obvious reason for doing something like that would be to yield a file which you could freely share with your co-workers for testing or other purposes. It might also be useful when you want to point an error in a TAP file in a vendor so you need to send him the file but you want to strip it of any personal or sensitive information. In general, whenever you need to share your TAP files across your department or your organization's boundaries.

The anonymization process is configurable; you can specify the fields you are interested in overwriting, and the way they are overwritten:

  • Statically, with a constant value
  • With a random integer value between specific limits (when the node stores an INTEGER
Of course it would be prudent to explicitly try to preserve existing severe or fatal error information as removing it would render the file inappropriate for the purposes of communicating errors or for testing purposes. In other words, the anonymization process should probably overwrite the following fields:
  • Imsi
  • Msisdn
  • Imei
  • AddressStringDigits
  • DialledDigits
  • CamelServerAddress
  • CalledNumber
  • CallingNumber
  • CamelDestinationNumber
  • ThirdPartyNumber

Online demo

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Features - Usage

The module's interface is shown below:

Usage: TAP_Anonymizer <options>
where options must include:
        -i inputTapFileName
                Input TAP file
        -o createdTapFileName
                TAP file containing anonymized information
        -fs anonymizeSpec.xml
                customization of anonymizing process
and optionally, any of:
        -V
                output version number
        -v
                increase verbosity (you can use it more than once, e.g. -vv)
        -h
                this help message

Obviously, the input and output TAP3 filenames must be specified. Equally important, the anonymizing specification XML file, provided by the "-fs anonymizeSpec.xml" argument dictates what to do.
Here is a sample XML file:

<TapAnonymizer>
    <Modify nodeType="Msisdn" action="constant" value="306941234567" />
    <Modify nodeType="Charge" action="random" minValue="0" maxValue="256" />
</TapAnonymizer>

With this specification, all the Msisdn nodes would get a constant telephone number (306941234567) and all Charge nodes would get random integer values between 0 and 256 (inclusive). Notice that we are using the ASN.1 grammar type names to specify the nodes.

You can "glue" this component with a simple script monitoring a directory (perhaps an output directory of your rating engine - the "errored" directory), and automatically anonymize all your problematic TAP-in files, in preparation for submiting to the offending PMN. The simple but complete interface allows chaining this module with existing processes and systems or using it in conjunction with other modules to provide more complex solutions for your installation.

 
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