Publishing data about individuals without revealing sensitive information about them is an important problem. In recent years, a new definition of privacy called k-anonymity has gained popularity. In a k-anonymized dataset, each record is indistinguishable from at least k − 1 other records with respect to certain “identifying ” attributes. In this paper we show using two simple attacks that a k-anonymized dataset has some subtle, but severe privacy problems. First, an attacker can discover the values of sensitive attributes when there is little diversity in those sensitive attributes. This kind of attack is a known problem [60]. Second, attackers often have background knowledge, and we show that k-anonymity does not guarantee privacy against attackers using background knowledge. We give a detailed analysis of these two attacks and we propose a novel and powerful privacy criterion called ℓ-diversity that can defend against such attacks. In addition to building a formal foundation for ℓ-diversity, we show in an experimental evaluation that ℓ-diversity is practical and can be implemented efficiently. 1.

Trio is a new database system that manages not only data, butalsotheaccuracy and lineage of the data. Inexact (uncertain, probabilistic, fuzzy, approximate, incomplete, and imprecise!) databases have been proposed in the past, and the lineage problem also has been studied. The goals of the Trio project are to combine and distill previous work into a simple and usable model, design a query language as an understandable extension to SQL, and most importantly build a working system—a system that augments conventional data management with both accuracy and lineage as an integral part of the data. This paper provides numerous motivating applications for Trio and lays out preliminary plans for the data model, query language, and prototype system.

Literature on information integration across databases tacitly assumes that the data in each database can be revealed to the other databases. However, there is an increasing need for sharing information across autonomous entities in such a way that no information apart from the answer to the query is revealed. We formalize the notion of minimal information sharing across private databases, and develop protocols for intersection, equijoin, intersection size, and equijoin size. We also show how new applications can be built using the proposed protocols.

Encryption is a well established technology for protecting sensitive data. However, once encrypted, data can no longer be easily queried aside from exact matches. We present an order-preserving encryption scheme for numeric data that allows any comparison operation to be directly applied on encrypted data. Query results produced are sound (no false hits) and complete (no false drops). Our scheme handles updates gracefully and new values can be added without requiring changes in the encryption of other values. It allows standard database indexes to be built over encrypted tables and can easily be integrated with existing database systems. The proposed scheme has been designed to be deployed in application environments in which the intruder can get access to the encrypted database, but does not have prior domain information such as the distribution of values and cannot encrypt or decrypt arbitrary values of his choice. The encryption is robust against estimation of the true value in such environments.

We propose and evaluate the concept of a semantically-smart disk system (SDS). As opposed to a traditional "smart" disk, an SDS has detailed knowledge of how the file system above is using the disk system, including information about the on-disk data structures of the file system. An SDS exploits this knowledge to transparently improve performance or enhance functionality beneath a standard block read/write interface. To automatically acquire this knowledge, we introduce a tool (EOF) that can discover file-system structure for certain types of file systems, and then show how an SDS can exploit this knowledge on-line to understand file-system behavior. We quantify the space and time overheads that are common in an SDS, showing that they are not excessive. We then study the issues surrounding SDS construction by designing and implementing a number of prototypes as case studies; each case study exploits knowledge of some aspect of the file system to implement powerful functionality beneath the standard SCSI interface. Overall, we find that a surprising amount of functionality can be embedded within an SDS, hinting at a future where disk manufacturers can compete on enhanced functionality and not simply cost-per-byte and performance.

We present a practical and efficient approach to incorporating privacy policy enforcement into an existing application and database environment, and we explore some of the semantic tradeoffs introduced by enforcing these privacy policy rules at cell-level granularity. Through a comprehensive set of performance experiments, we show that the cost of privacy enforcement is small, and scalable to large databases. 1

To preserve client privacy in the data mining process, a variety of techniques based on random perturbation of individual data records have been proposed recently. In this paper, we present FRAPP, a generalized matrix-theoretic framework of random perturbation, which facilitates a systematic approach to the design of perturbation mechanisms for privacy-preserving mining. Specifically, FRAPP is used to demonstrate that (a) the prior techniques differ only in their choices for the perturbation matrix elements, and (b) a symmetric perturbation matrix with minimal condition number can be identified, maximizing the accuracy even under strict privacy guarantees. We also propose a novel perturbation mechanism wherein the matrix elements are themselves characterized as random variables, and demonstrate that this feature provides significant improvements in privacy at only a marginal cost in accuracy. The quantitative utility of FRAPP, which applies to random-perturbation-based privacy-preserving mining in general, is evaluated specifically with regard to frequentitemset mining on a variety of real datasets. Our experimental results indicate that, for a given privacy requirement, substantially lower errors are incurred, with respect to both itemset identity and itemset support, as compared to the prior techniques. 1.

Shmatikov z SRI International

Abstract not found

We introduce an auditing framework for determining whether a database system is adhering to its data disclosure policies. Users formulate audit expressions to specify the (sensitive) data subject to disclosure review. An audit component accepts audit expressions and returns all queries (deemed "suspicious") that accessed the specified data during their execution. The overhead