A classification of non-cryptographic anonymization techniques ensuring privacy in big data

Recently, Big Data processing becomes crucial to most enterprise and government applications due to the fast growth of the collected data. However, this data often includes private personal information that arise new security and privacy concerns. Moreover, it is widely agreed that the sheer scale of big data makes many privacy preserving techniques unavailing. Therefore, in order to ensure privacy in big data, anonymization is suggested as one of the most efficient approaches. In this paper, we will provide a new detailed classification of the most used non-cryptographic anonymization techniques related to big data including generalization and randomization approaches. Besides, the paper evaluates the presented techniques through integrity, confidentiality and credibility criteria. In addition, three relevant anonymization techniques including k-anonymity, l-diversity and t-closeness are tested on an extract of a huge real data set. © 2020, Kohat University of Science and Technology.