Protecting Individual Information Against Inference Attacks in Data Publishing

In many data-publishing applications, the data owner needs to protect sensitive information pertaining to individuals. Meanwhile, certain information is required to be published. The sensitive information could be considered as leaked, if an adversary can infer the real value of a sensitive entry with a high confidence. In this paper we study how to protect sensitive data when an adversary can do inference attacks using association rules derived from the data. We formulate the inference attack model, and develop complexity results on computing a safe partial table. We classify the general problem into subcases based on the requirements of publishing information, and propose the corresponding algorithms for finding a safe partial table to publish. We have conducted an empirical study to evaluate these algorithms on real data.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: DASFAA
• Authors: Chen Li, Houtan Shirani-Mehr, Xiaochun Yang
• Keywords: DASFAA 2007, Database, Inference Attack, Safe Partial Table, Sensitive Information