Press "Enter" to skip to content

L-Diversity versus K-Anonymity

Duncan Greaves explains the concepts behind l-diversity:

There are problems with K-anonymous datasets, namely the homogeneous pattern attack, and the background knowledge attack, details of which are in my original post. A slightly different approach to anonymising public datasets comes in the form of ℓ -diversity, a way of introducing further entropy/diversity into a dataset.

A sensitive data record is made of the following microdata types: the ID; any Key Attributes; and the confidential outcome attribute(s). ℓ -diversity seeks to extend the equivalence classes that we created using K-anonymity by generalisation and masking of the quasi-identifiers (the QI groups) to the confidential attributes in the record as well. The ℓ -diversity principle demands that, in each QI-group, at most 1/ ℓ of its tuples can have an identical sensitive attribute value.

L-diversity is not perfect either, but Duncan gives a good explanation of the topic.