Survey of k-Anonymity

Abstract

Many organisations are releasing microdata everyday for business and research purposes. This data does not include explicit identiers of an individual like name or address but it does contain data like date of birth, pin code, sex, marital-status etc which when combined with other publicly released data like voter registration data can identify an individual. This joining attack can also be used to obtain sensitive information about an individual, thus, putting the privacy of an individual in grave danger.K-anonymization is a technique that prevents the above mentioned attacks by modifying the microdata which is released for business or research purposes. This is done by applying generalization and suppression techniques to the microdata. In this paper, k-anonymity is introduced and also some of the algorithms are studied which help in achieving k-anonymity.