Privacy-Preserving Updates to Confidential and Anonymous Databases
Alberto Trombetta, Wei Jiang, Elisa Bertino, Lorenzo Bossi · Purdue e-Pubs (Purdue University System) · 2007
Suppose that Alice, owner of a k-anonymous database, needs to determine whether her database, when inserted with a tuple owned by Bob, is still k-anonymous.Suppose moreover that access t o the database is strictly controlled, because for example data are used for experiments that need to be maintained confidential.Clearly, allowing Alice to directly read the contents of the tuple breaks the privacy of Bob; on the other hand, the confidentiality of the database managed by Alice is violated once Bob has access to the contents of the database.Thus the problem is t o check whether the database inserted with the tuple is still k-anonymous, without letting Alice and Bob know the contents of the tuple and the database respectively.In this paper, we propose two protocols solving this problem on suppression-based and generalizationbased k-anonymous databases.The protocols rely on well-known cryptographic assumptions, and we provide experimental results illustrating their efficiency.