The Pitfalls of Hashing for Privacy
Résumé
Boosted by recent legislations, data anonymizationis fast becoming a norm. However, as of yet no generic solutionhas been found to safely release data. As a consequence, datacustodians often resort to ad-hoc means to anonymize datasets.Both past and current practices indicate that hashing is oftenbelieved to be an effective way to anonymize data. Unfortunately,in practice it is only rarely effective. This paper is a tutorialto explain the limits of cryptographic hash functions as ananonymization technique. Anonymity set is the best privacymodel that can be achieved by hash functions. However, thismodel has several shortcomings. We provide three case studiesto illustrate how hashing only yields a weakly anonymized data.The case studies include MAC and email address anonymizationas well as the analysis of Google Safe Browsing.Boosted by recent legislations, data anonymizationis fast becoming a norm. However, as of yet no generic solutionhas been found to safely release data. As a consequence, datacustodians often resort to ad-hoc means to anonymize datasets.Both past and current practices indicate that hashing is oftenbelieved to be an effective way to anonymize data. Unfortunately,in practice it is only rarely effective. This paper is a tutorialto explain the limits of cryptographic hash functions as ananonymization technique. Anonymity set is the best privacymodel that can be achieved by hash functions. However, thismodel has several shortcomings. We provide three case studiesto illustrate how hashing only yields a weakly anonymized data.The case studies include MAC and email address anonymizationas well as the analysis of Google Safe Browsing.
Origine | Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s) |
---|
Loading...