Toward big data risk analysis

The advent of social networks and Internet-of-Things has resulted in unprecedented capability of collecting, sharing and analyzing massive amounts of data. From a security perspective, Big Data may seriously weaken confidentiality, as techniques for improving Big Data analytics performance-including early fusion of heterogeneous data sources - increase the hidden redundancy of data representation, generating ill-protected copies. This gray area of redundancy triggers new disclosure threats that challenge traditional techniques to protect privacy and confidentiality. This position paper starts by proposing a definition of the Big Data Leak threat (as opposed to the one of data breach) and its role as a component of disclosure risk. Then, it discusses how a paradigm of Known, Detect, Contain and Recover could be used to establish Big Data security practices for containing disclosure risks connected to Big Data analytics.