Abstract
Recently, there has been an increasing need for the sharing of microdata containing information regarding an individual entity. As microdata usually contains sensitive information on an individual, releasing it directly for public use may violate existing privacy requirements. Thus, to avoid the privacy problems that occur through the release of microdata for public use, extensive studies have been conducted in the area of privacy-preserving data publishing (PPDP). The k-anonymity algorithm, which is the most popular method, guarantees that, for each record, there are at least k-1 other records included in the released data that have the same values for a set of quasi-identifier attributes. Given an original table, the corresponding k-anonymous table is obtained by generalizing each record in the table into an indistinguishable group, called the equivalent class, by replacing the specific values of the quasi-identifier attributes with more general values. However, query processing over the anonymized data is a very challenging task, due to generalized attribute values. In particular, the problem becomes more challenging with an equi-join query (which is the most common type of query in data analysis tasks) over k-anonymous tables, since with the generalized attribute values, it is hard to determine whether two records can be joinable. Thus, to address this challenge, in this paper, we develop a novel scheme that is able to effectively perform an equi-join between k-anonymous tables. The experiment results show that, through the proposed method, significant gains in accuracy over using a naive scheme can be achieved.
