US 11,928,242 B2
Masking personally identifiable information from machine-generated data
Adam Oliner, San Francisco, CA (US); and Nghi Nguyen, San Francisco, CA (US)
Assigned to Splunk Inc., San Francisco, CA (US)
Filed by SPLUNK Inc., San Francisco, CA (US)
Filed on Dec. 21, 2020, as Appl. No. 17/128,522.
Application 17/128,522 is a continuation of application No. 15/582,465, filed on Apr. 28, 2017, granted, now 10,929,560.
Prior Publication US 2021/0110062 A1, Apr. 15, 2021
This patent is subject to a terminal disclaimer.
Int. Cl. G06F 21/62 (2013.01); G06F 16/2458 (2019.01)
CPC G06F 21/6254 (2013.01) [G06F 16/2477 (2019.01)] 20 Claims
OG exemplary drawing
 
1. A computer-implemented method, comprising:
identifying one or more occurrences of a particular value in a set of events, each event including machine data associated with a timestamp, wherein an occurrence represents a location of the particular value within the machine data of an event;
determining a set of extraction rules from the one or more occurrences, wherein each extraction rule defines a pattern that identifies values in other events that are of a same type of information as the particular value and that match the pattern;
identifying, using the set of extraction rules, a plurality of events that include the values in the other events; and
masking the values in the machine data included in the plurality of events, the values to mask being identified using the set of extraction rules that define different fields in the plurality of events, wherein masking obscures the values from the machine data in accordance with a query having one or more commands executable to mask the values from the machine data included in the plurality of events.