An efficient approach for publishing microdata for multiple sensitive attributes

Abstract The publication of microdata is pivotal for medical research purposes, data analysis and data mining. These published data contain a substantial amount of sensitive information, for example, a hospital may publish many sensitive attributes such as diseases, treatments and symptoms. The release of multiple sensitive attributes is not desirable because it puts the privacy of individuals at risk. The main vulnerability of such approach while releasing data is that if an adversary is successful in identifying a single sensitive attribute, then other sensitive attributes can be identified by co-relation. A whole variety of techniques such as SLOMS, SLAMSA and others already exist for the anonymization of multiple sensitive attributes; however, these techniques have their drawbacks when it comes to preserving privacy and ensuring data utility. The extant framework lacks in terms of preserving privacy for multiple sensitive attributes and ensuring data utility. We propose an efficient approach (p, k)-Angelization for the anonymization of multiple sensitive attributes. Our proposed approach protects the privacy of the individuals and yields promising results compared with currently used techniques in terms of utility. The (p, k)-Angelization approach not only preserves the privacy by eliminating the threat of background join and non-membership attacks but also reduces the information loss thus improving the utility of the released information.