Data leakage Detection
While doing business, sometimes sensitive data must be handed over to supposedly trusted third parties. For example, a hospital may give patient records to researchers who will devise new treatments. Similarly, a company may have partnerships with other companies that require sharing customer data. Another enterprise may outsource its data processing, so data must be given to various other companies. We call the owner of the data the distributor and the supposedly trusted third parties the agents. Our goal is to detect when the distributor’s sensitive data has been leaked by agents, and if possible to identify the agent that leaked the data. We consider applications where the original sensitive data cannot be perturbed. Perturbation is a very useful technique where the data is modified and made “less sensitive” before being handed to agents. For example, one can add random noise to certain attributes, or one can replace exact values by ranges. However, in some cases it is important not to alter the original distributor’s data. For example, if an outsourcer is doing our payroll, he must have the exact salary and customer bank account numbers. If medical researchers will be treating patients (as opposed to simply computing statistics), they may need accurate data for the patients.