De-anonymization Attacks on Neuroimaging Datasets

Advances in imaging technologies, combined with inexpensive storage, have led to an explosion in the volume of publicly available neuroimaging datasets. Effective analyses of these images hold the potential for uncovering mechanisms that govern functioning of the human brain, and understanding various neurological diseases and disorders. The potential significance of these studies notwithstanding, a growing concern relates to the protection of privacy and confidentiality of subjects who participate in these studies. In this paper, we present a de-anonymization attack rooted in the innate uniqueness of the structure and function of the human brain. We show that the attack reveals not only the identity of an individual, but also the efficacy with which they performing cognitive tasks. Our attack relies on novel matrix analyses techniques that are used to extract discriminating features in neuroimages. These features correspond to individual-specific signatures that can be matched across datasets for highly accurate identification. We present data preprocessing, signature extraction, and matching techniques that are computationally inexpensive, and can scale to large datasets. We characterize the efficacy of our de-anonymization attacks on publicly available databases. Finally, we discuss implications of the attack and challenges associated with defending against such attacks.