Social Security Number Code Cracked, Study Claims

By U.S. News Staff

Posted: July 6, 2009

"Our work focuses on the inverse, harder, and much more consequential inference: it shows that it is possible to exploit the presumptive time and location of SSN issuance to estimate, quite reliably, unknown SSNs," Acquisti said.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Army Research Office, Carnegie-Mellon University and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.

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On the Net:

PNAS: http://www.pnas.org

Meaning of the first article I wrote.

To simplify what I wrote in the first article: With the specifically designed random number generator, you insert your social security number as the seed number, then use your birthday as the nth number; the resulting number is your unique equivalent social security number that no one can predict. If the government used this technique, then a crook could never figure out what your social security number means to the social security administration. It wouldn't matter if someone else knew your number because of the unique output of the specially designed random number generator. This could prevent identity theft.

Robert L. Matarainen of NY @ Sep 05, 2009 18:48:17 PM

Beating the Crook who gets your Social Security Number

Random number generators are not so random; for example, on a specifically designed random number generator, the first, second, third random number up to the nth random number is always the same if you feed in the same "Seed" number. SO by having a specially designed random number generator, you can feed in a person's social security number as the "Seed" number and the 5th, or nth number will be unique to the Seed Social Security Number. This resulting output number can be used to verify and confuse a crook because the nth number can be changed weekly, daily or whatever. So if the crook gets your social security number, who cares because the gov't is using your social security number as a seed and on certain days, only the unique nth number is significant.

Robert L. Matarainen of NY @ Aug 08, 2009 01:26:07 AM

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