Attacks on privacy and deFinetti's theorem

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

129 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this paper we present a method for reasoning about privacy using the concepts of exchangeability and deFinetti's theorem. We illustrate the usefulness of this technique by using it to attack a popular data sanitization scheme known as Anatomy. We stress that Anatomy is not the only sanitization scheme that is vulnerable to this attack. In fact, any scheme that uses the random worlds model, i.i.d. model, or tuple-independent model needs to be re-evaluated. The difference between the attack presented here and others that have been proposed in the past is that we do not need extensive background knowledge. An attacker only needs to know the nonsensitive attributes of one individual in the data, and can carry out this attack just by building a machine learning model over the sanitized data. The reason this attack is successful is that it exploits a subtle aw in the way prior work computed the probability of disclosure of a sensitive attribute. We demonstrate this theoretically, empirically, and with intuitive examples. We also discuss how this generalizes to many other privacy schemes.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationSIGMOD-PODS'09 - Proceedings of the International Conference on Management of Data and 28th Symposium on Principles of Database Systems
Pages127-138
Number of pages12
DOIs
StatePublished - 2009
EventInternational Conference on Management of Data and 28th Symposium on Principles of Database Systems, SIGMOD-PODS'09 - Providence, RI, United States
Duration: Jun 29 2009Jul 2 2009

Publication series

NameSIGMOD-PODS'09 - Proceedings of the International Conference on Management of Data and 28th Symposium on Principles of Database Systems

Other

OtherInternational Conference on Management of Data and 28th Symposium on Principles of Database Systems, SIGMOD-PODS'09
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityProvidence, RI
Period6/29/097/2/09

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software

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