Preserving private cloud service data based on hypergraph anonymization

Cloud computing is becoming increasingly popular due to its power in providing high-performance and flexible service capabilities. More and more internet users have accepted this innovative service model and been using various cloud-based services every day. However, these service-using data is quite valuable for marketing purposes, as it can reflect a user's interest and service-using pattern. Therefore, the privacy issues have been brought out. Recently, many studies focus on access control and other traditional security problems in cloud, and little studied on the topic of the private service data publishing. In this paper, we study the private service data publishing problem by representing the data with a hyper graph, which is quite efficient to illustrate complex relationships among users. We first formulate the problem with a popular background knowledge attack model named rank attack, and then provide an anonymization-based method to prevent the released data from such attacks. We also take data utility into consideration by defining specific information loss metrics. The performances of the methods have been validated by two sets of synthetic data.