ℓ-diversity: Privacy beyond k-anonymity

Ashwin Machanavajjhala, Daniel Kifer, Johannes Gehrke, Muthuramakrishnan Venkitasubramaniam

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

2466 Scopus citations

Abstract

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 article, 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 is a known problem. 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.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number1217302
JournalACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data
Volume1
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 1 2007

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • General Computer Science

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