A Novel Vertical Fragmentation Method for Privacy Protection Based on Entropy Minimization in a Relational Database

Many scholars have attempted to use an encryption method to resolve the problem of data leakage in data outsourcing storage. However, encryption methods reduce data availability and are inefficient. Vertical fragmentation perfectly solves this problem. It was first used to improve the access performance of the relational database, and nowadays some researchers employ it for privacy protection. However, there are some problems that remain to be solved with the vertical fragmentation method for privacy protection in the relational database. First, current vertical fragmentation methods for privacy protection require the user to manually define privacy constraints, which is difficult to achieve in practice. Second, there are many vertical fragmentation solutions that can meet privacy constraints; however, there are currently no quantitative evaluation criteria evaluating how effectively solutions can protect privacy more effectively. In this article, we introduce the concept of information entropy to quantify privacy in vertical fragmentation, so we can automatically discover privacy constraints. Based on this, we propose a privacy protection model with a minimum entropy fragmentation algorithm to achieve minimal privacy disclosure of vertical fragmentation. Experimental results show that our method is suitable for privacy protection with a lower overhead.