Stack and Deal: An Efficient Algorithm for Privacy Preserving Data Publishing

Abstract

Although k-Anonymity is a good way to publish microdata for research purposes, it still suffers from various attacks. Hence, many refinements of k-Anonymity have been proposed such as ldiversity and t-Closeness, with t-Closeness being one of the strictest privacy models. Satisfying t-Closeness for a lower value of t may yield equivalence classes with high number of records which results in a greater information loss. For a higher value of t, equivalence classes are still prone to homogeneity, skewness, and similarity attacks. This is because equivalence classes can be formed with fewer distinct sensitive attribute values and still satisfy the constraint t. In this paper, we introduce a new algorithm that overcomes the limitations of k-Anonymity and lDiversity and yields equivalence classes of size k with greater diversity and frequency of a SA value in all the equivalence classes differ by at-most one.