621 research outputs found

    A Taxonomy of Privacy-Preserving Record Linkage Techniques

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    The process of identifying which records in two or more databases correspond to the same entity is an important aspect of data quality activities such as data pre-processing and data integration. Known as record linkage, data matching or entity resolution, this process has attracted interest from researchers in fields such as databases and data warehousing, data mining, information systems, and machine learning. Record linkage has various challenges, including scalability to large databases, accurate matching and classification, and privacy and confidentiality. The latter challenge arises because commonly personal identifying data, such as names, addresses and dates of birth of individuals, are used in the linkage process. When databases are linked across organizations, the issue of how to protect the privacy and confidentiality of such sensitive information is crucial to successful application of record linkage. In this paper we present an overview of techniques that allow the linking of databases between organizations while at the same time preserving the privacy of these data. Known as 'privacy-preserving record linkage' (PPRL), various such techniques have been developed. We present a taxonomy of PPRL techniques to characterize these techniques along 15 dimensions, and conduct a survey of PPRL techniques. We then highlight shortcomings of current techniques and discuss avenues for future research

    Counteracting Bloom Filter Encoding Techniques for Private Record Linkage

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    Record Linkage is a process of combining records representing same entity spread across multiple and different data sources, primarily for data analytics. Traditionally, this could be performed with comparing personal identifiers present in data (e.g., given name, surname, social security number etc.). However, sharing information across databases maintained by disparate organizations leads to exchange of personal information pertaining to an individual. In practice, various statutory regulations and policies prohibit the disclosure of such identifiers. Private record linkage (PRL) techniques have been implemented to execute record linkage without disclosing any information about other dissimilar records. Various techniques have been proposed to implement PRL, including cryptographically secure multi-party computational protocols. However, these protocols have been debated over the scalability factors as they are computationally extensive by nature. Bloom filter encoding (BFE) for private record linkage has become a topic of recent interest in the medical informatics community due to their versatility and ability to match records approximately in a manner that is (ostensibly) privacy-preserving. It also has the advantage of computing matches directly in plaintext space making them much faster than their secure mutli-party computation counterparts. The trouble with BFEs lies in their security guarantees: by their very nature BFEs leak information to assist in the matching process. Despite this known shortcoming, BFEs continue to be studied in the context of new heuristically designed countermeasures to address known attacks. A new class of set-intersection attack is proposed in this thesis which re-examines the security of BFEs by conducting experiments, demonstrating an inverse relationship between security and accuracy. With real-world deployment of BFEs in the health information sector approaching, the results from this work will generate renewed discussion around the security of BFEs as well as motivate research into new, more efficient multi-party protocols for private approximate matching

    Privacy-preserving Deep Learning based Record Linkage

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    Deep learning-based linkage of records across different databases is becoming increasingly useful in data integration and mining applications to discover new insights from multiple sources of data. However, due to privacy and confidentiality concerns, organisations often are not willing or allowed to share their sensitive data with any external parties, thus making it challenging to build/train deep learning models for record linkage across different organizations' databases. To overcome this limitation, we propose the first deep learning-based multi-party privacy-preserving record linkage (PPRL) protocol that can be used to link sensitive databases held by multiple different organisations. In our approach, each database owner first trains a local deep learning model, which is then uploaded to a secure environment and securely aggregated to create a global model. The global model is then used by a linkage unit to distinguish unlabelled record pairs as matches and non-matches. We utilise differential privacy to achieve provable privacy protection against re-identification attacks. We evaluate the linkage quality and scalability of our approach using several large real-world databases, showing that it can achieve high linkage quality while providing sufficient privacy protection against existing attacks.Comment: 11 page

    A Combined Approach For Private Indexing Mechanism

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    Private indexing is a set of approaches for analyzing research data that are similar or resemble similar ones. This is used in the database to keep track of the keys and their values. The main subject of this research is private indexing in record linkage to secure the data. Because unique personal identification numbers or social security numbers are not accessible in most countries or databases, data linkage is limited to attributes such as date of birth and names to distinguish between the number of records and the real-life entities they represent. For security reasons, the encryption of these identifiers is required. Privacy-preserving record linkage, frequently used to link private data within several databases from different companies, prevents sensitive information from being exposed to other companies. This research used a combined method to evaluate the data, using classic and new indexing methods. A combined approach is more secure than typical standard indexing in terms of privacy. Multibit tree indexing, which groups comparable data in many ways, creates a scalable tree-like structure that is both space and time flexible, as it avoids the need for redundant block structures. Because the record pair numbers to compare are the Cartesian product of both the file record numbers, the work required grows with the number of records to compare in the files. The evaluation findings of this research showed that combined method is scalable in terms of the number of databases to be linked, the database size, and the time required

    Privacy-preserving record linkage using Bloom filters

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    <p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Combining multiple databases with disjunctive or additional information on the same person is occurring increasingly throughout research. If unique identification numbers for these individuals are not available, probabilistic record linkage is used for the identification of matching record pairs. In many applications, identifiers have to be encrypted due to privacy concerns.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A new protocol for privacy-preserving record linkage with encrypted identifiers allowing for errors in identifiers has been developed. The protocol is based on Bloom filters on <it>q</it>-grams of identifiers.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Tests on simulated and actual databases yield linkage results comparable to non-encrypted identifiers and superior to results from phonetic encodings.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>We proposed a protocol for privacy-preserving record linkage with encrypted identifiers allowing for errors in identifiers. Since the protocol can be easily enhanced and has a low computational burden, the protocol might be useful for many applications requiring privacy-preserving record linkage.</p

    Privacy preserving linkage and sharing of sensitive data

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    2018 Summer.Includes bibliographical references.Sensitive data, such as personal and business information, is collected by many service providers nowadays. This data is considered as a rich source of information for research purposes that could benet individuals, researchers and service providers. However, because of the sensitivity of such data, privacy concerns, legislations, and con ict of interests, data holders are reluctant to share their data with others. Data holders typically lter out or obliterate privacy related sensitive information from their data before sharing it, which limits the utility of this data and aects the accuracy of research. Such practice will protect individuals' privacy; however it prevents researchers from linking records belonging to the same individual across dierent sources. This is commonly referred to as record linkage problem by the healthcare industry. In this dissertation, our main focus is on designing and implementing ecient privacy preserving methods that will encourage sensitive information sources to share their data with researchers without compromising the privacy of the clients or aecting the quality of the research data. The proposed solution should be scalable and ecient for real-world deploy- ments and provide good privacy assurance. While this problem has been investigated before, most of the proposed solutions were either considered as partial solutions, not accurate, or impractical, and therefore subject to further improvements. We have identied several issues and limitations in the state of the art solutions and provided a number of contributions that improve upon existing solutions. Our rst contribution is the design of privacy preserving record linkage protocol using semi-trusted third party. The protocol allows a set of data publishers (data holders) who compete with each other, to share sensitive information with subscribers (researchers) while preserving the privacy of their clients and without sharing encryption keys. Our second contribution is the design and implementation of a probabilistic privacy preserving record linkage protocol, that accommodates discrepancies and errors in the data such as typos. This work builds upon the previous work by linking the records that are similar, where the similarity range is formally dened. Our third contribution is a protocol that performs information integration and sharing without third party services. We use garbled circuits secure computation to design and build a system to perform the record linkages between two parties without sharing their data. Our design uses Bloom lters as inputs to the garbled circuits and performs a probabilistic record linkage using the Dice coecient similarity measure. As garbled circuits are known for their expensive computations, we propose new approaches that reduce the computation overhead needed, to achieve a given level of privacy. We built a scalable record linkage system using garbled circuits, that could be deployed in a distributed computation environment like the cloud, and evaluated its security and performance. One of the performance issues for linking large datasets is the amount of secure computation to compare every pair of records across the linked datasets to nd all possible record matches. To reduce the amount of computations a method, known as blocking, is used to lter out as much as possible of the record pairs that will not match, and limit the comparison to a subset of the record pairs (called can- didate pairs) that possibly match. Most of the current blocking methods either require the parties to share blocking keys (called blocks identiers), extracted from the domain of some record attributes (termed blocking variables), or share reference data points to group their records around these points using some similarity measures. Though these methods reduce the computation substantially, they leak too much information about the records within each block. Toward this end, we proposed a novel privacy preserving approximate blocking scheme that allows parties to generate the list of candidate pairs with high accuracy, while protecting the privacy of the records in each block. Our scheme is congurable such that the level of performance and accuracy could be achieved according to the required level of privacy. We analyzed the accuracy and privacy of our scheme, implemented a prototype of the scheme, and experimentally evaluated its accuracy and performance against dierent levels of privacy

    Detection and Privacy Preservation of Sensitive Attributes Using Hybrid Approach for Privacy Preserving Record Linkage

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    Privacy Preserving Record Linkage (PPRL) is a major area of database research which entangles in colluding huge multiple heterogeneous data sets with disjunctive or additional information about an entity while veiling its private information. This paper gives an enhanced algorithm for merging two datasets using Sorted Neighborhood Deterministic approach and an improved Preservation algorithm which makes use of automatic selection of sensitive attributes and pattern mining over dynamic queries. We guarantee strong privacy, less computational complexity and scalability and address the legitimate concerns over data security and privacy with our approach
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