FQuery: SPARQL query rewriting to enforce data confidentiality

Abstract

RDF is an increasingly used framework for describing Web resources, including sensitive and confidential resources. In this context, we need an expressive language to query RDF databases. SPARQL has been defined to easily localize and extract data in an RDF graph. Since confidential data are accessed, SPARQL queries must be filtered so that only authorized data are returned with respect to some confidentiality policy. In this paper, we model a confidentiality policy as a set of positive and negative filters (corresponding respectively to permissions and prohibitions) that apply to SPARQL queries. We then define rewriting algorithms that transform the queries so that the results returned by transformed queries are compliant with the confidentiality policy. © 2010 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.