Entwining sanitization and personalization on databases

In the last decade, a lot of research has been done to prevent the illegal distribution of digital content, such as musical works and movies. However, only few works have tackled this problem for databases, and even less for databases containing personal and sensitive information (e.g, a medical database). In this work, we address this latter issue by proposing SaPData (for Sanitization and Personalization of Databases), an approach in which the owner of a database personalizes it before distributing it to ensure that a malicious buyer can be traced back in case of an illegal redistribution. Our novel solution entwines the personalization step with a sanitization mechanism to prevent the leak of personal information and limit the privacy risks. Thus, our objective is to release a sanitized and personalized database, both to protect the privacy of the concerned individuals and to prevent the illegal redistribution, even from a collusion of malicious buyers.