Breaching Euclidean Distance-Preserving Data Perturbation Using Few Known Inputs

Abstract: We examine Euclidean distance-preserving data perturbation as a tool for privacy-preserving data mining. Such perturbations allow many important data mining algorithms e.g. hierarchical and k-means clustering), with only minor modification, to be applied to the perturbed data and produce exactly the same results as if applied to the original data. However, the issue of how well the privacy of the original data is preserved needs careful study. We engage in this study by assuming the role of an attacker armed with a small set of known original data tuples (inputs). Little work has been done examining this kind of attack when the number of known original tuples is less than the number of data dimensions. We focus on this important case, develop and rigorously analyze an attack that utilizes any number of known original tuples. The approach allows the attacker to estimate the original data tuple associated with each perturbed tuple and calculate the probability that the estimation results in a privacy breach. On a real 16-dimensional dataset, we show that the attacker, with 4 known original tuples, can estimate an original unknown tuple with less than 7% error with probability exceeding 0.8.