Salting as a Countermeasure against Attacks on Privacy Preserving Record Linkage Techniques

Yanling Chen, Rainer Schnell, Frederik Armknecht, Youzhe Heng

2022

Abstract

Privacy-preserving record linkage (PPRL) is the research area dedicated to linking records from multiple databases for the same patient without revealing identifying information during the linkage. A popular PPRL approach is based on Bloom filters (BF). Recent research has shown that BF based PPRL could be vulnerable to cryptanalysis attacks. Among several hardening techniques, salting was considered to be one of the most suitable defences. A thorough evaluation of the amount of protection provided by salting is lacking from the literature. In this paper, we empirically evaluate the effect of salting on privacy by demonstrating the resilience of salted BF to the two most advanced attack methods: pattern mining and graph-matching. Experimental results show that salting could improve resilience against both attacks, although more minor against graph-matching attacks than pattern mining attacks.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Chen Y., Schnell R., Armknecht F. and Heng Y. (2022). Salting as a Countermeasure against Attacks on Privacy Preserving Record Linkage Techniques. In Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2022) - Volume 5: HEALTHINF; ISBN 978-989-758-552-4, SciTePress, pages 353-360. DOI: 10.5220/0010787200003123

in Bibtex Style

@conference{healthinf22,
author={Yanling Chen and Rainer Schnell and Frederik Armknecht and Youzhe Heng},
title={Salting as a Countermeasure against Attacks on Privacy Preserving Record Linkage Techniques},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2022) - Volume 5: HEALTHINF},
year={2022},
pages={353-360},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010787200003123},
isbn={978-989-758-552-4},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2022) - Volume 5: HEALTHINF
TI - Salting as a Countermeasure against Attacks on Privacy Preserving Record Linkage Techniques
SN - 978-989-758-552-4
AU - Chen Y.
AU - Schnell R.
AU - Armknecht F.
AU - Heng Y.
PY - 2022
SP - 353
EP - 360
DO - 10.5220/0010787200003123
PB - SciTePress