Louis Davidson has a two-part series on dynamic data masking in SQL Server 2016.
An interesting feature that is being added to SQL Server 2016 is Dynamic Data Masking. What it does is, allow you to show a user a column, but instead of showing them the actual data, it masks it from their view. Like if you have a table that has email addresses, you might want to mask the data so most users can’t see the actual data when they are querying the data. It falls under the head of security features in Books Online (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt130841.aspx), but as we will see, it doesn’t behave like classic security features, as you will be adding some code to the DDL of the table, and (as of this writing in CTP3.2, the ability to fine tune who can and cannot see unmasked data isn’t really there.)
The moral here is that need to be careful about how you use this feature. It is not as strict as column level security (or as Row Level Security will turn out to be, which is the next series of blogs to follow), so if a user has ad-hoc access to your db, they could figure out the data with some simple queries.
Louis’s second part is particularly interesting, as he delves into the various ways in which you can back into answers (some of which, like casting values to other types, have been fixed).