Building Confidential and Efficient Query Services in the Cloud with RASP Data Perturbation

With the wide deployment of public cloud computing infrastructures, using clouds to host data query services has become an appealing solution for the advantages on scalability and cost-saving. However, some data might be sensitive that the data owner does not want to move to the cloud unless the data confidentiality and query privacy are guaranteed. On the other hand, a secured query service should still provide efficient query processing and significantly reduce the in-house workload to fully realize the benefits of cloud computing. We propose the RASP data perturbation method to provide secure and efficient range query and kNN query services for protected data in the cloud. The RASP data perturbation method combines order preserving encryption, dimensionality expansion, random noise injection, and random projection, to provide strong resilience to attacks on the perturbed data and queries. It also preserves multidimensional ranges, which allows existing indexing techniques to be applied to speedup range query processing. The kNN-R algorithm is designed to work with the RASP range query algorithm to process the kNN queries. We have carefully analyzed the attacks on data and queries under a precisely defined threat model and realistic security assumptions. Extensive experiments have been conducted to show the advantages of this approach on efficiency and security.Comment: 18 pages, to appear in IEEE TKDE, accepted in December 201

An Accuracy-Assured Privacy-Preserving Recommender System for Internet Commerce

Recommender systems, tool for predicting users' potential preferences by computing history data and users' interests, show an increasing importance in various Internet applications such as online shopping. As a well-known recommendation method, neighbourhood-based collaborative filtering has attracted considerable attention recently. The risk of revealing users' private information during the process of filtering has attracted noticeable research interests. Among the current solutions, the probabilistic techniques have shown a powerful privacy preserving effect. When facing $k$ Nearest Neighbour attack, all the existing methods provide no data utility guarantee, for the introduction of global randomness. In this paper, to overcome the problem of recommendation accuracy loss, we propose a novel approach, Partitioned Probabilistic Neighbour Selection, to ensure a required prediction accuracy while maintaining high security against $k$NN attack. We define the sum of $k$ neighbours' similarity as the accuracy metric alpha, the number of user partitions, across which we select the $k$ neighbours, as the security metric beta. We generalise the $k$ Nearest Neighbour attack to beta k Nearest Neighbours attack. Differing from the existing approach that selects neighbours across the entire candidate list randomly, our method selects neighbours from each exclusive partition of size $k$ with a decreasing probability. Theoretical and experimental analysis show that to provide an accuracy-assured recommendation, our Partitioned Probabilistic Neighbour Selection method yields a better trade-off between the recommendation accuracy and system security.Comment: replacement for the previous versio

Exploring Privacy Preservation in Outsourced K-Nearest Neighbors with Multiple Data Owners

The k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) algorithm is a popular and effective classification algorithm. Due to its large storage and computational requirements, it is suitable for cloud outsourcing. However, k-NN is often run on sensitive data such as medical records, user images, or personal information. It is important to protect the privacy of data in an outsourced k-NN system. Prior works have all assumed the data owners (who submit data to the outsourced k-NN system) are a single trusted party. However, we observe that in many practical scenarios, there may be multiple mutually distrusting data owners. In this work, we present the first framing and exploration of privacy preservation in an outsourced k-NN system with multiple data owners. We consider the various threat models introduced by this modification. We discover that under a particularly practical threat model that covers numerous scenarios, there exists a set of adaptive attacks that breach the data privacy of any exact k-NN system. The vulnerability is a result of the mathematical properties of k-NN and its output. Thus, we propose a privacy-preserving alternative system supporting kernel density estimation using a Gaussian kernel, a classification algorithm from the same family as k-NN. In many applications, this similar algorithm serves as a good substitute for k-NN. We additionally investigate solutions for other threat models, often through extensions on prior single data owner systems

Privacy and Confidentiality in an e-Commerce World: Data Mining, Data Warehousing, Matching and Disclosure Limitation

The growing expanse of e-commerce and the widespread availability of online databases raise many fears regarding loss of privacy and many statistical challenges. Even with encryption and other nominal forms of protection for individual databases, we still need to protect against the violation of privacy through linkages across multiple databases. These issues parallel those that have arisen and received some attention in the context of homeland security. Following the events of September 11, 2001, there has been heightened attention in the United States and elsewhere to the use of multiple government and private databases for the identification of possible perpetrators of future attacks, as well as an unprecedented expansion of federal government data mining activities, many involving databases containing personal information. We present an overview of some proposals that have surfaced for the search of multiple databases which supposedly do not compromise possible pledges of confidentiality to the individuals whose data are included. We also explore their link to the related literature on privacy-preserving data mining. In particular, we focus on the matching problem across databases and the concept of ``selective revelation'' and their confidentiality implications.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000240 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org