Danilo Fabrino Favato, Gabriel Coutinho, Mário S. Alvim, Natasha Fernandes
arXiv 13 Jun 2022 · cs.CR · publishedProceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (2022) · 4 citations (OpenAlex)
arXiv:2206.06493 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text
In this paper we describe, formalize, implement, and experimentally evaluate a novel transaction re-identification attack against official foreign-trade statistics releases in Brazil. The attack's goal is to re-identify the importers of foreign-trade transactions (by revealing the identity of the company performing that transaction), which consequently violates those importers' fiscal secrecy (by revealing sensitive information: the value and volume of traded goods). We provide a mathematical formalization of this fiscal secrecy problem using principles from the framework of quantitative information flow (QIF), then carefully identify the main sources of imprecision in the official data releases used as auxiliary information in the attack, and model transaction re-construction as a linear optimization problem solvable through integer linear programming (ILP). We show that this problem is NP-complete, and provide a methodology to identify tractable instances. We exemplify the feasibility of our attack by performing 2,003 transaction re-identifications that in total amount to more than $137M, and affect 348 Brazilian companies. Further, since similar statistics are produced by other statistical agencies, our attack is of broader concern.
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The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.
| Reference | Intensity | Mentions | Sections | Main text | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mário Alvim, Konstantinos Chatzikokolakis, Annabelle McIver, Carroll… (2020) The Science of Quantitative Information Flow self | 0.811 | 4 | 2 | 100% |
| 2 | SECEX (2021) Revisão metodológica da contabilização dos fluxos de exportação e importação brasileira de bens, 2021 | 0.737 | 3 | 2 | 100% |
| 3 | Simson Garfinkel, John M. Abowd, and Christian Martindale (2019) Understanding database reconstruction attacks on public data | 0.405 | 1 | 1 | 100% |
| 4 | Cynthia Dwork and Aaron Roth (2014) The algorithmic foundations of differential privacy | 0.405 | 1 | 1 | 100% |
| 5 | Wilton Bussab and Pedro Morettin (2002) Estatística Básica | 0.405 | 1 | 1 | 100% |
| 6 | Gabriel Nunes (2021) A formal quantitative study on privacy in the publication of educational censuses in brazil, 2021 | 0.405 | 1 | 1 | 100% |
| 7 | Chris Culnane, Benjamin I. P. Rubinstein, and Vanessa Teague Health data in an open world | 0.405 | 1 | 1 | 100% |
| 8 | Karl-Gustaf Lofgren, Torsten Persson, and Jorgen W Weibull (2002) Markets with asymmetric information: The contributions of George Akerlof, Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz | 0.405 | 1 | 1 | 100% |
| 9 | World Trade Organization (1994) Agreement on implementation of article VI of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 1994, 1994 | 0.405 | 1 | 1 | 100% |
| 10 | Jon Kleinberg and Éva Tardos (2006) Algorithm design | 0.405 | 1 | 1 | 100% |
Showing the top 10 of 13 scored citations.