2,643 research outputs found

    Quantifying Privacy: A Novel Entropy-Based Measure of Disclosure Risk

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    It is well recognised that data mining and statistical analysis pose a serious treat to privacy. This is true for financial, medical, criminal and marketing research. Numerous techniques have been proposed to protect privacy, including restriction and data modification. Recently proposed privacy models such as differential privacy and k-anonymity received a lot of attention and for the latter there are now several improvements of the original scheme, each removing some security shortcomings of the previous one. However, the challenge lies in evaluating and comparing privacy provided by various techniques. In this paper we propose a novel entropy based security measure that can be applied to any generalisation, restriction or data modification technique. We use our measure to empirically evaluate and compare a few popular methods, namely query restriction, sampling and noise addition.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figure

    Towards trajectory anonymization: a generalization-based approach

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    Trajectory datasets are becoming popular due to the massive usage of GPS and locationbased services. In this paper, we address privacy issues regarding the identification of individuals in static trajectory datasets. We first adopt the notion of k-anonymity to trajectories and propose a novel generalization-based approach for anonymization of trajectories. We further show that releasing anonymized trajectories may still have some privacy leaks. Therefore we propose a randomization based reconstruction algorithm for releasing anonymized trajectory data and also present how the underlying techniques can be adapted to other anonymity standards. The experimental results on real and synthetic trajectory datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed techniques

    ODIN: Obfuscation-based privacy-preserving consensus algorithm for Decentralized Information fusion in smart device Networks

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    The large spread of sensors and smart devices in urban infrastructures are motivating research in the area of the Internet of Things (IoT) to develop new services and improve citizens’ quality of life. Sensors and smart devices generate large amounts of measurement data from sensing the environment, which is used to enable services such as control of power consumption or traffic density. To deal with such a large amount of information and provide accurate measurements, service providers can adopt information fusion, which given the decentralized nature of urban deployments can be performed by means of consensus algorithms. These algorithms allow distributed agents to (iteratively) compute linear functions on the exchanged data, and take decisions based on the outcome, without the need for the support of a central entity. However, the use of consensus algorithms raises several security concerns, especially when private or security critical information is involved in the computation. In this article we propose ODIN, a novel algorithm allowing information fusion over encrypted data. ODIN is a privacy-preserving extension of the popular consensus gossip algorithm, which prevents distributed agents from having direct access to the data while they iteratively reach consensus; agents cannot access even the final consensus value but can only retrieve partial information (e.g., a binary decision). ODIN uses efficient additive obfuscation and proxy re-encryption during the update steps and garbled circuits to make final decisions on the obfuscated consensus. We discuss the security of our proposal and show its practicability and efficiency on real-world resource-constrained devices, developing a prototype implementation for Raspberry Pi devices

    ODIN: Obfuscation-based privacy-preserving consensus algorithm for Decentralized Information fusion in smart device Networks

    Get PDF
    The large spread of sensors and smart devices in urban infrastructures are motivating research in the area of the Internet of Things (IoT) to develop new services and improve citizens’ quality of life. Sensors and smart devices generate large amounts of measurement data from sensing the environment, which is used to enable services such as control of power consumption or traffic density. To deal with such a large amount of information and provide accurate measurements, service providers can adopt information fusion, which given the decentralized nature of urban deployments can be performed by means of consensus algorithms. These algorithms allow distributed agents to (iteratively) compute linear functions on the exchanged data, and take decisions based on the outcome, without the need for the support of a central entity. However, the use of consensus algorithms raises several security concerns, especially when private or security critical information is involved in the computation. In this article we propose ODIN, a novel algorithm allowing information fusion over encrypted data. ODIN is a privacy-preserving extension of the popular consensus gossip algorithm, which prevents distributed agents from having direct access to the data while they iteratively reach consensus; agents cannot access even the final consensus value but can only retrieve partial information (e.g., a binary decision). ODIN uses efficient additive obfuscation and proxy re-encryption during the update steps and garbled circuits to make final decisions on the obfuscated consensus. We discuss the security of our proposal and show its practicability and efficiency on real-world resource-constrained devices, developing a prototype implementation for Raspberry Pi devices

    Towards privacy-preserving and fairness-enhanced item ranking in recommender systems

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    Nous présentons une nouvelle approche de préservation de la vie privée pour améliorer l’équité des éléments dans les systèmes de classement. Nous utilisons des techniques de post-traitement dans un environnement de recommandation multipartite afin d’équilibrer l’équité et la protection de la vie privée pour les producteurs et les consommateurs. Notre méthode utilise des serveurs de calcul multipartite sécurisés (MPC) et une confidentialité différentielle (DP) pour maintenir la confidentialité des utilisateurs tout en atténuant l’injustice des éléments sans compromettre l’utilité. Les utilisateurs soumettent leurs données sous forme de partages secrets aux serveurs MPC, et tous les calculs sur ces données restent cryptés. Nous évaluons notre approche à l’aide d’ensembles de données du monde réel, tels qu’Amazon Digital Music, Book Crossing et MovieLens-1M, et analysons les compromis entre confidentialité, équité et utilité. Notre travail encourage une exploration plus approfondie de l’intersection de la confidentialité et de l’équité dans les systèmes de recommandation, jetant les bases de l’intégration d’autres techniques d’amélioration de la confidentialité afin d’optimiser l’exécution et l’évolutivité pour les applications du monde réel. Nous envisageons notre approche comme un tremplin vers des solutions de bout en bout préservant la confidentialité et promouvant l’équité dans des environnements de recommandation multipartites.We present a novel privacy-preserving approach to enhance item fairness in ranking systems. We employ post-processing techniques in a multi-stakeholder recommendation environment in order to balance fairness and privacy protection for both producers and consumers. Our method utilizes secure multi-party computation (MPC) servers and differential privacy (DP) to maintain user privacy while mitigating item unfairness without compromising utility. Users submit their data as secret shares to MPC servers, and all calculations on this data remain encrypted. We evaluate our approach using real-world datasets, such as Amazon Digital Music, Book Crossing, and MovieLens-1M, and analyze the trade-offs between privacy, fairness, and utility. Our work encourages further exploration of the intersection of privacy and fairness in recommender systems, laying the groundwork for integrating other privacy-enhancing techniques to optimize runtime and scalability for real-world applications. We envision our approach as a stepping stone towards end-to-end privacy-preserving and fairness-promoting solutions in multi-stakeholder recommendation environments

    Privacy Tradeoffs in Predictive Analytics

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    Online services routinely mine user data to predict user preferences, make recommendations, and place targeted ads. Recent research has demonstrated that several private user attributes (such as political affiliation, sexual orientation, and gender) can be inferred from such data. Can a privacy-conscious user benefit from personalization while simultaneously protecting her private attributes? We study this question in the context of a rating prediction service based on matrix factorization. We construct a protocol of interactions between the service and users that has remarkable optimality properties: it is privacy-preserving, in that no inference algorithm can succeed in inferring a user's private attribute with a probability better than random guessing; it has maximal accuracy, in that no other privacy-preserving protocol improves rating prediction; and, finally, it involves a minimal disclosure, as the prediction accuracy strictly decreases when the service reveals less information. We extensively evaluate our protocol using several rating datasets, demonstrating that it successfully blocks the inference of gender, age and political affiliation, while incurring less than 5% decrease in the accuracy of rating prediction.Comment: Extended version of the paper appearing in SIGMETRICS 201
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