Engineering Commons^™

Beyond K-Anonymity: A Decision Theoretic Framework For Assessing Privacy Risk, Guy Lebanon, Monica Scannapieco, Mohamed Fouad, Elisa Bertino

Cyber Center Publications

An important issue any organization or individual has to face when managing data containing sensitive information, is the risk that can be incurred when releasing such data. Even though data may be sanitized before being released, it is still possible for an adversary to reconstruct the original data using additional information thus resulting in privacy violations. To date, however, a systematic approach to quantify such risks is not available. In this paper we develop a framework, based on statistical decision theory, that assesses the relationship between the disclosed data and the resulting privacy risk. We model the problem of deciding …