Maximizing sharing of protected information

Abstract

Despite advances in recent years in the area of mandatory access control in database systems, today's information repositories remain vulnerable to inference and data association attacks that can result in serious information leakage. Without support for coping against these attacks, sensitive information can be put at risk because of release of other (less sensitive) related information. The ability to protect information diclosure against such improper leakage would be of great benefit to governmental, public, and private institutions, which are, today more than ever, required to make portions of their data available for external release. In this paper we address the problem of classifying information by enforcing explicit data classification as well as inference and association constraints. We formulate the problem of determining a classification that ensures satisfaction of the constraints, while at the same time guaranteeing that information will not be overclassified. We present an approach to the solution of this problem and give an algorithm implementing it which is linear in simple cases, and quadratic in the general case. We also analyze a variant of the problem that is NP-complete. copy; 2002 Elsevier science (USA).