Researchers from TK, Ruhr University Bochum, and Open Universiteit presented their paper titled “Anonify: Decentralized Dual-level Anonymity for Medical Data Donation” at this year's Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2024). The paper proposes the decentralized anonymity protocol Anonify, which provides strong user protection for medical data donation without relying on a single entity. The sensitive nature of medical data poses significant privacy and security challenges, including the concern of de-anonymization. Anonify protects both communication and data aspects by leveraging Distributed Point Functions, and incorporating k-anonymity and stratified sampling within a secret-sharing-based setting. The protocol is efficient in preserving privacy and optimizing data utility for researchers.

Citation information:

Sarah Abdelwahab Gaballah, Lamya Abdullah, Mina Alishahi, Thanh Hoang Long Nguyen, Ephraim Zimmer, Max Mühlhäuser, and Karola Marky. 2024. Anonify: Decentralized Dual-level Anonymity for Medical Data Donation. In Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, Vol. 2024, no. 3, pp. 94–108, Jul. 2024.