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The k-Anonymity Problem Is Hard

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Fundamentals of Computation Theory (FCT 2009)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 5699))

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Abstract

The problem of publishing personal data without giving up privacy is becoming increasingly important. An interesting formalization recently proposed is the k-anonymity. This approach requires that the rows in a table are clustered in sets of size at least k and that all the rows in a cluster are related to the same tuple, after the suppression of some records. The problem has been shown to be NP-hard when the values are over a ternary alphabet, k = 3 and the rows length is unbounded. In this paper we give a lower bound on the approximation of two restrictions of the problem, when the records values are over a binary alphabet and k = 3, and when the records have length at most 8 and k = 4, showing that these restrictions of the problem are APX-hard.

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References

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© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Bonizzoni, P., Della Vedova, G., Dondi, R. (2009). The k-Anonymity Problem Is Hard. In: Kutyłowski, M., Charatonik, W., Gębala, M. (eds) Fundamentals of Computation Theory. FCT 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5699. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03409-1_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03409-1_4

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-03408-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-03409-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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