Anonymity by Indistinguishability

In Brief

The family of anonymity by indistinguishability models is based on comparison among individuals present in data, and it aims to make each individual so similar as to be indistinguishable from others. They aims to produce anonymity sets, i.e., equivalence classes, having specific properties.

More in Detail

The first paradigm of anonymity by indistinguishability models is the k-anonymity, where a subject is considered anonymous if an adversary cannot achieve identification of her within a set of other k-1 subjects. This set of k individuals is called the anonymity set.

Unfortunately, the k-anonymity framework can be vulnerable in some cases. To overcome to such vulnerabilities, other variants guaranteeing different properties were designed, In particular, the main models are the l-diversity and the t-closeness.

Bibliography

This entry was written by Francesca Pratesi.