The machine giveth and the machine taketh away: a parrot attack on clinical text deidentified with hiding in plain sight.

ABSTRACT:

Objective

Clinical corpora can be deidentified using a combination of machine-learned automated taggers and hiding in plain sight (HIPS) resynthesis. The latter replaces detected personally identifiable information (PII) with random surrogates, allowing leaked PII to blend in or "hide in plain sight." We evaluated the extent to which a malicious attacker could expose leaked PII in such a corpus.

Materials and methods

We modeled a scenario where an institution (the defender) externally shared an 800-note corpus of actual outpatient clinical encounter notes from a large, integrated health care delivery system in Washington State. These notes were deidentified by a machine-learned PII tagger and HIPS resynthesis. A malicious attacker obtained and performed a parrot attack inten

SUBMITTER: Carrell DS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6857511 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature