Privacy-Preserving Data Publishing in the Cloud: A Multi-level Utility Controlled Approach

Conventional private data publication schemes are targeted at publication of sensitive datasets with the objective of retaining as much utility as possible for statistical (aggregate) queries while ensuring the privacy of individuals´ information. However, such an approach to data publishing is no longer applicable in shared multi-tenant cloud scenarios where users often have different levels of access to the same data. In this paper, we present a privacy-preserving data publishing framework for publishing large datasets with the goals of providing different levels of utility to the users based on their access privileges. We design and implement our proposed multi-level utility-controlled data anonymization schemes in the context of large association graphs considering three levels of user utility namely: (i) users having access to only the graph structure (ii) users having access to graph structure and aggregate query results and (iii) users having access to graph structure, aggregate query results as well as individual associations. Our experiments on real large association graphs show that the proposed techniques are effective, scalable and yield the required level of privacy and utility for user-specific utility and access privilege levels.