Towards an anti-inference (K, ℓ)-anonymity model with value association rules

Abstract

As a privacy-preserving microdata publication model, K-Anonymity has some application limits, such as (1) it cannot satisfy the individual-defined k mechanism requirement, and (2) it is attached with a certain extent potential privacy disclosure risk on published microdata, i.e. existing high-probability inference violations under some prior knowledge on k-anonymized microdata that can surely result in personal private information disclosure. We propose the (k, ℓ)-anonymity model with data generalization approach to support more flexible and antiinference k-anonymization on a tabular microdata, where k indicates the anonymization level of an identifying attribute cluster and ℓ refers to the diversity level of a sensitive attribute cluster on a record. Within the model, k and ℓ are designed on each record and they can be defined subjectively by the corresponding individual. Beside, the model can prevent two kinds of inference attacks for microdata publication, (1) inferring identifying attributes values when their value domains are known; (2) inferring sensitive attributes values with respect to some value associations in the microdata. Further, we propose an algorithm to describe the k-anonymization process in the model. Finally, we take a scenario to illustrate its feasibility, flexibility, and generality. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.