Enabling Multi-level Trust in Privacy Preserving Data Mining

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-level trust framework for privacy-preserving data mining that prevents malicious data miners from reconstructing original data by combining differently perturbed copies, enhancing privacy guarantees.

Contribution

It extends perturbation-based PPDM to multiple trust levels, correlates perturbations across copies, and proves robustness against diversity attacks.

Findings

Robust against diversity attacks in multi-level trust settings.

Allows flexible, on-demand generation of perturbed data copies.

Ensures data privacy even when multiple perturbed copies are combined.

Abstract

Privacy Preserving Data Mining (PPDM) addresses the problem of developing accurate models about aggregated data without access to precise information in individual data record. A widely studied \emph{perturbation-based PPDM} approach introduces random perturbation to individual values to preserve privacy before data is published. Previous solutions of this approach are limited in their tacit assumption of single-level trust on data miners. In this work, we relax this assumption and expand the scope of perturbation-based PPDM to Multi-Level Trust (MLT-PPDM). In our setting, the more trusted a data miner is, the less perturbed copy of the data it can access. Under this setting, a malicious data miner may have access to differently perturbed copies of the same data through various means, and may combine these diverse copies to jointly infer additional information about the original data that the data owner does not intend to release. Preventing such \emph{diversity attacks} is the key challenge of providing MLT-PPDM services. We address this challenge by properly correlating perturbation across copies at different trust levels. We prove that our solution is robust against diversity attacks with respect to our privacy goal. That is, for data miners who have access to an arbitrary collection of the perturbed copies, our solution prevent them from jointly reconstructing the original data more accurately than the best effort using any individual copy in the collection. Our solution allows a data owner to generate perturbed copies of its data for arbitrary trust levels on-demand. This feature offers data owners maximum flexibility.