Semantic Attack on Disassociated Transactions

Asma AlShuhail, Jianhue Shao

2022

Abstract

Publishing data about individuals is a double-edged sword; it can provide a significant benefit for a range of organisations to help understand issues concerning individuals and improve services they offer. However, it can also represent a serious threat to individuals’ privacy. To deal with these threats, researchers have worked on anonymisation methods. One such method is disassociation which protects transaction data by dividing them into chunks to hide sensitive links between data items. However, this method does not take into consideration semantic relationships that may exist among data items, which can be exploited by attackers to expose protected data. In this paper, we propose a de-anonymisation approach to attacking transaction data anonymised by the disassociation method. Our approach attempts to re-associate disassociated transaction data by exploiting semantic relationships among data items, and our findings show that the disassociation method may not protect transaction data effectively: up to 60% of the disassociated items can be re-associated, thereby breaking the privacy of nearly 70% of protected itemsets in disassociated transactions.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

AlShuhail A. and Shao J. (2022). Semantic Attack on Disassociated Transactions. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP, ISBN 978-989-758-553-1, pages 60-72. DOI: 10.5220/0010780500003120

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icissp22,
author={Asma AlShuhail and Jianhue Shao},
title={Semantic Attack on Disassociated Transactions},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP,},
year={2022},
pages={60-72},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010780500003120},
isbn={978-989-758-553-1},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP,
TI - Semantic Attack on Disassociated Transactions
SN - 978-989-758-553-1
AU - AlShuhail A.
AU - Shao J.
PY - 2022
SP - 60
EP - 72
DO - 10.5220/0010780500003120