ORCID Profile
0000-0002-5386-5871
Current Organisation
Australian National University
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Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Date: 27-06-2023
DOI: 10.1145/3589641
Abstract: The linkage of records to identify common entities across multiple data sources has gained increasing interest over the last few decades. In the absence of unique entity identifiers, quasi-identifying attributes such as personal names and addresses are generally used to link records. Due to privacy concerns that arise when such sensitive information is used, privacy-preserving record linkage (PPRL) methods have been proposed to link records without revealing any sensitive or confidential information about these records. Popular PPRL methods such as Bloom filter encoding, however, are known to be susceptible to various privacy attacks. Therefore, a systematic analysis of the privacy risks associated with sensitive databases as well as PPRL methods used in linkage projects is of great importance. In this article we present a novel framework to assess the vulnerabilities of sensitive databases and existing PPRL encoding methods. We discuss five types of vulnerabilities: frequency, length, co-occurrence, similarity, and similarity neighborhood, of both plaintext and encoded values that an adversary can exploit in order to reidentify sensitive plaintext values from encoded data. In an experimental evaluation we assess the vulnerabilities of two databases using five existing PPRL encoding methods. This evaluation shows that our proposed framework can be used in real-world linkage applications to assess the vulnerabilities associated with sensitive databases to be linked, as well as with PPRL encoding methods.
Publisher: IEEE
Date: 04-2019
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 29-02-2016
Abstract: This collection of articles addresses the interconnections between punishment, citizenship and identity. As immigration and crime control measures have intersected, prisons in a number of countries have ended up housing a growing population of foreign-national offenders and immigration detainees. It is somewhat surprising that criminologists have traditionally spent so little time exploring the relationship between the prison and national identity. With notable exceptions, scholars almost universally treat the prison as an institution bounded by and within the nation-state. This special issue seeks to disrupt that convention of prison studies and criminology more broadly. Focusing on the incarceration of foreign-nationals in erse contexts, the contributions to this issue collectively argue that the prison is a projection of national sovereignty and an expression of state power. It is also a concrete space where global inequalities play out. When considered through the lens of citizenship, our understanding of imprisonment shifts to include other geographical sites both within the nation-state and elsewhere, the prison’s intersections with other legal frameworks, and enduring matters of race, gender and class. The contributions capture these dimensions by weaving together policy analysis and first-hand narratives from around the world.
Publisher: Brill
Date: 17-06-2016
DOI: 10.1163/15718166-12342097
Abstract: In this article, we explore the human rights implications of immigration detention in Britain and France by focusing on duration. In so doing, we show how practices in both systems fail to meet basic human rights protections, raising urgent questions about the legitimacy and justification of these sites of confinement. Whereas in the uk problems arise from the absence of a statutory upper time limit to detention, in France it is the brevity for which foreign nationals may be held that raises humanitarian concerns. In the uk , the uncertain duration of detention makes it difficult for detainees to obtain or retain legal advice. Those who are held for long periods of time struggle to maintain their right to family life, while most find the lack of clarity about the period of their confinement hard to endure. In France, where most detainees are released or deported within a matter of days, it is often difficult to access due process and legal protections in time. This brief period of confinement before expulsion contrasts with its enduring effect on their family ties and future. Drawing on policy documents, law, and the limited body of empirical material available on these carceral sites, we map the similarities and differences between them in order to identify the limits as well as some prospects of human rights in immigration detention.
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 02-03-2017
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Date: 2018
Publisher: Universidad de Valladolid
Date: 17-10-2018
Abstract: El siguiente artículo tiene como objetivo principal ofrecer una herramienta conceptual metodológica para analizar la representación de la violencia machista en los actuales medios digitales. Esta herramienta es el concepto del feminismo posthumano “residuo” (waste), por la cual un concepto que deja de ser valorado por el origen de su producción se reconfigura para volver al circuito neo-liberal. Las autoras del presente artículo pretenden reconfigurar la noción de género como un elemento relacional para ofrecer ópticas éticas y estéticas de la materialización que se hace de los cuerpos de las mujeres en estas situaciones.
Publisher: University of California Press
Date: 2017
Abstract: As unprecedented levels of human mobility continue to define our era, criminal justice institutions in countries around the world are increasingly shaped by mass migration and its control. This collection brings together legal scholars from Europe and the United States to consider the implications of the attendant changes on the exercise of state penal power and those subject to it. The contributions in this special issue are united by a shared set of questions about the salience of citizenship for contemporary criminal justice policies and practices. They are specifically concerned with questions of fair and equal treatment, the changing configurations of state sovereignty, and the significance of migration on criminal justice policies and practices. Collectively, the articles show how, in grappling with mass mobility and ersity, states are devising novel forms of control, many of which erode basic criminal justice principles and reinforce existing social hierarchies.
Publisher: University of California Press
Date: 2017
DOI: 10.1525/NCLR.2017.20.1.39
Abstract: Since creating the Returns and Reintegration Fund in 2008, the British government has financed a variety of initiatives around the world under the rubric of “managing migration,” blurring the boundaries between migration control and punishment. This article documents and explores a series of overlapping case studies undertaken in Nigeria and Jamaica where the United Kingdom has funded prison building programs, mandatory prisoner transfer agreements, prison training programs, and resettlement assistance for deportees. These initiatives demonstrate in quite concrete ways a series of interconnections between criminal justice and migration control that are both novel and, in their postcolonial location, familiar. In their ties to international development and foreign policy, they also illuminate how humanitarianism allows penal power to move beyond the nation state, raising important questions about our understanding of punishment and its application.
Publisher: ACM
Date: 19-10-2020
Publisher: IEEE
Date: 09-2016
Publisher: Swansea University
Date: 11-08-2020
Abstract: Introduction Over the last decade, the demand for linking records about people across databases has increased in various domains. Privacy challenges associated with linking sensitive information led to the development of privacy-preserving record linkage techniques. The multiple dynamic match-key encoding approach recently proposed by Randall et al. (IJPDS, 2019) is such a technique aimed at providing sufficient privacy for linkage applications while obtaining high linkage quality. However, the use of this encoding in large databases can reveal frequency information that can allow the re-identification of encoded values. Objectives We propose a frequency-based attack to evaluate the privacy guarantees of multiple dynamic match-key encoding. We then present two improvements to this match-key encoding approach to prevent such a privacy attack. Methods The proposed attack analyses the frequency distributions of in idual match-keys in order to identify the attributes used for each match-key, where we assume the adversary has access to a plain-text database with similar characteristics as the encoded database. We employ a set of statistical correlation tests to compare the frequency distributions of match-key values between the encoded and plain-text databases. Once the attribute combinations used for match-keys are discovered, we then re-identify encoded sensitive values by utilising a frequency alignment method. Next, we propose two modifications to the match-key encoding one to alter the original frequency distributions and another to make the frequency distributions uniform. Both will help to prevent frequency-based attacks. Results We evaluate our privacy attack using two large real-world databases. The results show that in certain situations the attack can successfully re-identify a set of sensitive values encoded using the multiple dynamic match-key encoding approach. On the databases used in our experiments, the attack is able to re-identify plain-text values with a precision and recall of both up to 98%. Furthermore, we show that our proposed improvements are able to make this attack harder to perform with only a small reduction in linkage quality. Conclusions Our proposed privacy attack demonstrates the weaknesses of multiple match-key encoding that should be taken into consideration when linking databases that contain sensitive personal information. Our proposed modifications ensure that the multiple dynamic match-key encoding approach can be used securely while retaining high linkage quality.
Publisher: Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality
Date: 29-07-2022
DOI: 10.29012/JPC.764
Abstract: Record linkage is the process of identifying records that corresponds to the same real-world entities across different databases. Due to the absence of unique entity identifiers, record linkage is often based on quasi-identifying values of entities (in iduals) such as their names and addresses. However, regulatory ethical and legal obligations can limit the use of such personal information in the linkage process in order to protect the privacy and confidentiality of entities. Privacy-preserving record linkage (PPRL) aims to develop techniques that enable the linkage of records without revealing any sensitive or confidential information about the entities that are represented by these records. Over the past two decades various PPRL techniques have been proposed to securely link records between different databases by encrypting and/or encoding sensitive values. However, some PPRL techniques, such as popular Bloom filter encoding, have shown to be susceptible to privacy attacks. These attacks exploit the weaknesses of PPRL techniques by trying to reidentify encrypted and/or encoded sensitive values. In this paper we propose a taxonomy for analysing such attacks on PPRL where we categorise attacks across twelve dimensions, including different types of adversaries, different attack types, assumed knowledge of the adversary, the vulnerabilities of encoded and/or encrypted values exploited by an attack, and assessing the success of attacks. Our taxonomy can be used by data custodians to analyse the privacy risks associated with different PPRL techniques in terms of existing as well as potential future attacks on PPRL.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 09-2022
Publisher: Swansea University
Date: 28-08-2018
Abstract: IntroductionDue to privacy concerns personal identifiers used for linking data often have to be encoded (masked) before being linked across organisations. Bloom filter (BF) encoding is a popular privacy technique that is now employed in real-world linkage applications. Recent research has however shown that BFs are vulnerable to cryptanalysis attacks. Objectives and ApproachAttacks on BFs either exploit that encoding frequent plain-text values (such as common names) results in corresponding frequent BFs, or they apply pattern mining to identify co-occurring BF bit positions that correspond to frequent encoded q-grams (sub-strings). In this study we empirically evaluated the privacy of in iduals encoded in BFs against two recent cryptanalysis attack methods by Christen et al. (2017/2018). We used two snapshots of the North Carolina Voter Registration database for our evaluation, where pairs of records corresponding to the same voter (with name or address variations) resulted in files with 222,251 BFs and 224,061 plain-text records, respectively. ResultsWe encoded between two and four of the fields first and last name, street, and city into one BF per record. For combinations of three and four fields all plain-text values and BFs were unique, challenging any frequency-based attack. For hardening BFs, different suggested methods (balancing, random hashing, XOR, BLIP, and salting) were applied. Without any hardening applied up to 20.7% and 5% of plain-text values were correctly re-identified as 1-to-1 matches by both the pattern-mining and frequency-based attack methods, respectively. No more than 5\\% correct 1-to-1 re-identification matches were achieved with the frequency-based attack on BFs encoding two fields when either balancing, random hashing, or XOR folding was applied while the pattern-mining based attack was not successful in any correct re-identifications for any hardening technique. Conclusion/ImplicationsGiven that BF encoding is now being employed in real-world linkage applications, it is important to study the limits of this privacy technique. Our experimental evaluation shows that although basic BFs without hardening technique are susceptible to cryptanalysis attacks, some hardening techniques are able to protect BFs against these attacks.
No related grants have been discovered for Anushka Vidanage.