Privacy-Preserving Obfuscation of Critical Infrastructure Networks
This addresses privacy and security concerns for critical infrastructure operators by preventing data exploitation by malevolent agents, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing privacy-preserving techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of releasing critical infrastructure network data without disclosing sensitive information, proposing a novel obfuscation mechanism that combines privacy-preserving building blocks with bi-level optimization to improve accuracy, with experimental results showing it substantially reduces potential attack damage on real energy and transportation networks.
The paper studies how to release data about a critical infrastructure network (e.g., the power network or a transportation network) without disclosing sensitive information that can be exploited by malevolent agents, while preserving the realism of the network. It proposes a novel obfuscation mechanism that combines several privacy-preserving building blocks with a bi-level optimization model to significantly improve accuracy. The obfuscation is evaluated for both realism and privacy properties on real energy and transportation networks. Experimental results show the obfuscation mechanism substantially reduces the potential damage of an attack exploiting the released data to harm the real network.