Uncoordinated syntactic privacy: a new composable metric for multiple, independent data publishing
2025 (English)In: IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, ISSN 1556-6013, E-ISSN 1556-6021, Vol. 20, p. 3362-3373Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
A privacy model is a privacy condition, dependent on a parameter, that guarantees an upper bound on the risk of reidentification disclosure and maybe also on the risk of attribute disclosure by an adversary. A privacy model is composable if the privacy guarantees of the model are preserved, possibly to a limited extent, after repeated independent application of the privacy model. From the opposite perspective, a privacy model is not composable if multiple independent data releases, each of them satisfying the requirements of the privacy model, may result in a privacy breach. Current privacy models are broadly classified into syntactic ones (such as k-anonymity and l-diversity) and semantic ones, which essentially refer to E-differential privacy (e-DP) and variations thereof. While e-DP and its variants offer strong composability properties, syntactic notions are not composable unless data releases are conducted by a single, centralized data holder that uses specialized notions such as m-invariance and τ -safety. In this work, we propose m-uncoordinated-syntactic-privacy (m-USP), the first syntactic notion with composability properties for the independent publication of nondisjoint data, in other words, without a centralized data holder. Theoretical results are formally proven, and experimental results demonstrate that the risk to individuals does not increase significantly, in contrast to non-composable methods, that are susceptible to attribute disclosure. In most cases, the utility degradation caused by the extra protection is less than 5% and decreases as the value of m increases.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
IEEE, 2025. Vol. 20, p. 3362-3373
Keywords [en]
composability property, Data privacy, privacy model, syntactic privacy
National Category
Computer Sciences Computer Systems
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-237587DOI: 10.1109/TIFS.2025.3551645ISI: 001455443300004Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105001938533OAI: oai:DiVA.org:umu-237587DiVA, id: diva2:1954321
2025-04-242025-04-242025-04-24Bibliographically approved