US 12,229,555 B2
Generating masks for formats including masking restrictions
Ariel Farkash, Shimshit (IL); and Micha Gideon Moffie, Zichron Yaakov (IL)
Assigned to International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US)
Filed by International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US)
Filed on Jun. 20, 2021, as Appl. No. 17/352,350.
Prior Publication US 2022/0405099 A1, Dec. 22, 2022
Int. Cl. G06F 9/30 (2018.01); G06F 11/34 (2006.01); G06F 11/36 (2006.01); G06F 21/62 (2013.01); H04L 9/06 (2006.01)
CPC G06F 9/30018 (2013.01) [G06F 9/30038 (2023.08); G06F 11/3409 (2013.01); G06F 11/3684 (2013.01); G06F 21/6227 (2013.01); H04L 9/06 (2013.01); H04L 2209/04 (2013.01)] 20 Claims
OG exemplary drawing
 
1. A system, comprising a hardware processor configured to:
generate a composite regular expression representing a composite textual pattern of a composite format, where the composite format is a hierarchical composition of sub-formats in a recursive manner, and each sub-format is a format that comprises a data unit that can match, search, and rank itself, and the sub-formats are represented as regular expressions;
search received data using the composite regular expression for an instance of the composite format,
wherein the instance of the composite format is validated by performing nested validations in which the sub-formats of the composite format are validated before the composite format is validated, and
wherein a masking restriction is included with the received data, the masking restriction comprising a range of possible values for a mask and an immutable restriction to hold a sub-format of the composite format defined using a regular expression to an original value;
generate the mask for the instance of the composite format based on the masking restriction; and
output the generated mask.