Kobbi Nissim
More info
- Affiliation
- Georgetown University, formerly Ben-Gurion University
- Known for
- Differential privacy, reconstruction attacks
- Awards
- Gödel Prize 2017
Israeli computer scientist who first proved that "anonymised" statistics leak, then helped write the cure.
In 2003 Nissim and Irit Dinur showed something statistical agencies did not want to hear: anyone allowed to ask enough questions of a database, and given answers that are accurate enough, can reconstruct nearly all of it. Stripping out the names makes no difference. The reconstruction attack made it clear that noise is not a compromise but a requirement.
Three years later came the answer, written with Cynthia Dwork, Frank McSherry and Adam Smith: differential privacy, with a precise definition of how much noise is enough. The group received the 2017 Gödel Prize. Nissim has since worked on translating the idea into law, including how the GDPR's anonymisation requirements might be read mathematically.