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Checking inference-proofness of attribute-disjoint and duplicate-preserving fragmentations

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Abstract

The transmission of own and partly confidential data to another agent comes along with the risk of enabling the receiver to infer information he is not entitled to learn. We consider a specific countermeasure against unwanted inferences about associations between data values whose combination of attributes are declared to be sensitive. This countermeasure fragments a relation instance into attribute-disjoint and duplicate-preserving projections such that no sensitive attribute combination is contained in any projection. Unfortunately, the intended goal of inference-proofness will not always be accomplished. Inferences might be based on combinatorial reasoning, since duplicate-preservation implies that the frequencies of value associations in visible fragments equals those in the original relation instance. In addition, the receiver might exploit entailment reasoning about functional dependencies, numerical dependencies and tuple-generating dependencies, as presumably known from the underlying database schema. We investigate possible interferences of combinatorial reasoning and entailment reasoning and identify basic conditions for a fragmentation to violate inference-proofness. Moreover, we outline a comprehensive method to effectively check the inference-proofness of a given fragmentation and we experimentally evaluate the computational efficiency of a partial prototype implementation.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to sincerely thank our student assistant Anna-Sophie Picker for supporting us to implement the partial prototype and to perform the experiments. Moreover, we are very thankful to the anonymous reviewers for carefully examining our original submission and providing helpful comments and constructive suggestions for improvements.

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  1. Fakultät für Informatik, Technische Universität Dortmund, Dortmund, D-44221, Germany

    Joachim Biskup & Marcel Preuß

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  1. Joachim Biskup
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  2. Marcel Preuß
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Correspondence to Joachim Biskup.

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Biskup, J., Preuß, M. Checking inference-proofness of attribute-disjoint and duplicate-preserving fragmentations. Ann Math Artif Intell 87, 43–82 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10472-019-09655-5

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