Protection of Database Security via Collaborative Inference Detection

Malicious users can exploit the correlation among data to infer sensitive information from a series of seemingly innocuous data accesses. Thus, we develop an inference violation detection system to protect sensitive data content. Based on data dependency, database schema and semantic knowledge, we constructed a semantic inference model (SIM) that represents the possible inference channels from any attribute to the pre-assigned sensitive attributes. The SIM is then instantiated to a semantic inference graph (SIG) for query-time inference violation detection. For a single user case, when a user poses a query, the detection system will examine his/her past query log and calculate the probability of inferring sensitive information. The query request will be denied if the inference probability exceeds the pre-specified threshold. For multi-user cases, the users may share their query answers to increase the inference probability. Therefore, we develop a model to evaluate collaborative infer...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TKDE
• Authors: Yu Chen, Wesley W. Chu
• Keywords: Inference, Inference Violation Detection, Semantic Inference, TKDE 2008