Inference aggregation detection in database management systems

Abstract

This paper makes seven contributions to security aggregation research. It identifies inference aggregation and cardinality aggregation as two distinct aspects of the aggregation problem. The paper develops the concept of a semantic relationship graph to describe the relationships between data and then presents inference aggregation as the problem of finding alternative paths between vertices on the graph. An algorithm is presented for processing the semantic relationship graph to discover whether potential inference aggregation problems exist. A method of detecting some aggregation conditions within the DBMS is presented which uses the normal DBMS query language and adds additional catalytic data to the DBMS to permit a query to make the inference. The paper also suggests use of set theory to describe aggregation conditions and the addition of set operations to the DBMS to permit the description of aggregation detection queries.

Strategic Alignment of Business Processes

“…Hinke [96] shows a further depth to aggregation by comparing general cardinality aggregations and inference aggregation in which predictions of inference emerge from data analysis activities. Here, not only are similar activities from antecedent processes joined in an integrated output.…”

Computer science and decision theory

“…Another key direction of research involves role-based access control. For a sampling of relevant literature on these topics, see [34,71,97,106,165,193,194,195,291,294,295,320,324,325,384,410,411].…”

Aggregation in relational databases: Controlled disclosure of sensitive information

“…The exclusion of U from V , denoted V | ¬U , is the view obtained from V by appending to its selection condition the negation of the selection condition of U . 3 Obviously, V = (V | U ) ∪ (V | ¬U ).…”

“…In the environment of relational databases, this implies that the release of a limited number of tuples would be permitted, but once this number exceeds a predetermined threshold, security might be breached. This problem of controlled disclosure of sensitive information is an example of what is known as the aggregation problem [5,3,6,7,2,4].…”