CAREER: Towards Privacy and Confidentiality Preserving Databases

University Of North Carolina At Charlotte, Charlotte NC

Investigators

Abstract

IIS-0546027 Xintao Wu <xwu@uncc.edu> University of North Carolina at Charlotte CAREER: Towards Privacy and Confidentiality Preserving Databases Many databases from government, commercial and non-profit organizations maintain a huge amount of data on sensitive or confidential information such as income and medical records. As a result, protecting the privacy and confidentiality of such databases is of primary concern. Data perturbation approach is often adopted when database owners export or publish their sensitive or confidential data. However, it is very hard to quantify and evaluate the tradeoffs between the data utility and the disclosure risk in practice since the data space which is used for disclosure analysis is almost infinite. This project develops a novel model-based disclosure analysis approach which builds statistical models first and analyzes potential disclosure at the models' parameter level. Since the search space of parameters is much smaller than that of data and all information which attackers can derive is contained in those parameters, this approach is more effective and efficient. This project also conducts the theoretical study of perturbation based approach by developing the explicit form between construction accuracy and noise added for various reconstruction methods since previous research only conducted empirical evaluations. The results of this project will provide a prototype system which can fully conduct disclosure analysis using both model based and randomization based approaches to satisfy users' complex privacy and confidentiality specifications. The system aims to be used by local industry partners and other organizations. Education impacts of this project will include involvement of graduate and undergraduate students and incorporation of research projects into courses related to database security and privacy. Two Ph.D. graduate students will be produced to enhance the nation's capability in information security. All results including publications, empirical studies and software will be disseminated via the project web site (http://www.cs.uncc.edu/~xwu/career).