Data Obfuscation (DO)

Data obfuscation techniques are used to prevent the intrusion of private and sensitive online data, such as electronic health records (EHR). However, issues have stemmed from an inability to vigorously prevent privacy attacks. Additionally, DO techniques do not preserve data clusters, and there is not a set of standards for DO technique comparison.

Because of these challenges, IT researchers have proposed a more robust DO technique known as Nearest Neighbor Data Substitution (NeNDS), which is favored because of its privacy protection features and ability to sustain data clusters. The same researchers continue to prove that reverse engineering is easily accomplished with geometric transformations related to cluster preservations. For these and other reasons, there is a growing consensus that DO techniques may be key to maintaining EHR privacy.