Aegis: A Correlation-Based Data Masking Advisor for Data Sharing Ecosystems

Data sharing ecosystems connect providers, consumers, and intermediaries to facilitate the exchange and use of data for a wide range of downstream tasks. In sensitive domains such as healthcare, privacy is enforced as a hard constraint, any shared data must satisfy a minimum privacy threshold. However, among all masking configurations that meet this requirement, the utility of the masked data can vary significantly, posing a key challenge: how to efficiently select the optimal configuration that preserves maximum utility. This paper presents Aegis, a middleware framework that selects optimal masking configurations for machine learning datasets with features and class labels. Aegis incorporates a utility optimizer that minimizes predictive utility deviation, quantifying shifts in feature label correlations due to masking. Our framework leverages limited data summaries (such as 1D histograms) or none to estimate the feature label joint distribution, making it suitable for scenarios where raw data is inaccessible due to privacy restrictions. To achieve this, we propose a joint distribution estimator based on iterative proportional fitting, which allows supporting various feature label correlation quantification methods such as mutual information, chi square, or g3. Our experimental evaluation of real world datasets shows that Aegis identifies optimal masking configurations over an order of magnitude faster, while the resulting masked datasets achieve predictive performance on downstream ML tasks on par with baseline approaches and complements privacy anonymization data masking techniques.