Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2013 Mar 18:2013:262-6.
eCollection 2013.

Identifying inference attacks against healthcare data repositories

Affiliations

Identifying inference attacks against healthcare data repositories

Jaideep Vaidya et al. AMIA Jt Summits Transl Sci Proc. .

Abstract

Health care data repositories play an important role in driving progress in medical research. Finding new pathways to discovery requires having adequate data and relevant analysis. However, it is critical to ensure the privacy and security of the stored data. In this paper, we identify a dangerous inference attack against naive suppression based approaches that are used to protect sensitive information. We base our attack on the querying system provided by the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project, though it applies in general to any medical database providing a query capability. We also discuss potential solutions to this problem.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1:
Figure 1:
HCUPnet released data
Figure 2:
Figure 2:
HCUPnet inferred data

Similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. Hellinger FJ . Hiv patients in the hcup database: a study of hospital utilization and costs . Inquiry . 2004 ; 41 ( 1 ): 95 – 105 . - PubMed
    1. Jiang HJ , Ciccone K , Urlaub CJ , Boyd D , Meeks G , Horton L . Adapting the hcup qis for hospital use: the experience in new york state . Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety . 2001 ; 27 ( 4 ): 200 – 215 . - PubMed
    1. Beale EML . Branch and bound methods for mathematical programming systems . Discrete Optimization II Proceedings of the Advanced Research Institute on Discrete Optimization and Systems Applications of the Systems Science, Panel of NATO and of the Discrete Optimization Symposium, volume 5 of Annals of Discrete Mathematics ; Elsevier ; 1979 . pp. 201 – 219 . URL http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167506008703510 . - DOI
    1. Sweeney Latanya . k-anonymity: a model for protecting privacy . International Journal on Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-based Systems . 2002 ;( 5 ): 557 – 570 .
    1. Adam Nabil R , Wortmann John C . Security-control methods for statistical databases: A comparative study . ACM Computing Surveys . 1989 December ; 21 ( 4 ): 515 – 556 . URL http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/7684.7685 . - DOI

LinkOut - more resources