Matching Noisy Keys for Obfuscation

Data sketching has emerged as a key infrastructure for large-scale data analysis on streaming and distributed data. Merging sketches enables efficient estimation of cardinalities and frequency histograms over distributed data. However, merging sketches can require that each sketch stores hash codes for identifiers in different data sets or partitions, in order to perform effective matching. This can reveal identifiers during merging or across different data set or partition owners. This paper presents a framework to use noisy hash codes, with the noise level selected to obfuscate identifiers while allowing matching, with high probability. We give probabilistic error bounds on simultaneous obfuscation and matching, concluding that this is a viable approach.