Data security is a critical issue for many organizations. Sensitive data must be protected from both inside and outside attackers. Access control policies and related mechanisms have been used for several decades to prevent unauthorized users from accidentally or deliberately extracting sensitive information. However, access control mechanisms alone cannot ensure the security of a database. An authorized user might invoke a sequence of queries, each of which is under his privileges, but whose results can be combined to infer some additional information about the data. Various “inference control” methods have been developed in the past to prevent users from inferring sensitive information through a sequence of queries. Private inference control provides privacy properties to both database owners and users making queries. It protects the database owner by limiting access to the data according to a specified inference control policy, but also to protect the user by preventing the da...
Geetha Jagannathan, Rebecca N. Wright