Pattern Masking for Dictionary Matching

Data masking is a common technique for sanitizing sensitive data maintained in database systems, and it is also becoming increasingly important in various application areas, such as in record linkage of personal data. This work formalizes the Pattern Masking for Dictionary Matching (PMDM) problem. In PMDM, we are given a dictionary 𝒟 of d strings, each of length 𝓁, a query string q of length 𝓁, and a positive integer z, and we are asked to compute a smallest set K ⊆ {1,…,𝓁}, so that if q[i] is replaced by a wildcard for all i ∈ K, then q matches at least z strings from 𝒟. Solving PMDM allows providing data utility guarantees as opposed to existing approaches.