Title
"Better than nothing" privacy with bloom filters: to what extent?
Abstract
Bloom filters are probabilistic data structures which permit to conveniently represent set membership. Their performance/memory efficiency makes them appealing in a huge variety of scenarios. Their probabilistic operation, along with the implicit data representation, yields some ambiguity on the actual data stored, which, in scenarios where cryptographic protection is unviable or unpractical, may be somewhat considered as a better than nothing privacy asset. Oddly enough, even if frequently mentioned, to the best of our knowledge the (soft) privacy properties of Bloom filters have never been explicitly quantified. This work aims to fill this gap. Starting from the adaptation of probabilistic anonymity metrics to the Bloom filter setting, we derive exact and (tightly) approximate formulae which permit to readily relate privacy properties with filter (and universe set) parameters. Using such relations, we quantitatively investigate the emerging privacy/utility trade-offs. We finally preliminary assess the advantages that a tailored insertion of a few extra (covert) bits achieves over the commonly employed strategy of increasing ambiguity via addition of random bits.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1007/978-3-642-33627-0_27
Privacy in Statistical Databases
Keywords
Field
DocType
probabilistic data structure,probabilistic anonymity metrics,implicit data representation,actual data,probabilistic operation,bloom filter,universe set,privacy asset,bloom filter setting,privacy property
Data mining,Bloom filter,Data structure,Differential privacy,Computer science,Cryptography,Theoretical computer science,Hash function,Anonymity,Probabilistic logic,Statistics,Ambiguity
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
8
0.72
26
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Giuseppe Bianchi1100984.46
Lorenzo Bracciale26811.88
Pierpaolo Loreti39318.75