K-Anonymity Based Approach for Privacy-Preserving Web Service Selection

To guarantee privacy in service oriented environments, it is essential to check for compatibility between a client's privacy requirements and a Web service privacy policies before invoking the Web service operation. In this paper, we focus on privacy at the Web service operation level. We present an approach that integrates k-Anonymity into a privacy management framework using Web Services Conversation Language (WSCL) definitions. In particular, we use the notion of k-Anonymity to determine the extent to which the invocation of an operation can be inferred if one knows that a downstream operation was invoked. We provide both a formal definition as well as an implementation of the proposed approach.