Applied quantitative information flow and statistical databases

Abstract

We firstly describe an algebraic structure which serves as solid basis to quantitatively reason about information flows. We demonstrate how programs in form of partition of states fit into that theoretical framework. The paper presents a new method and implementation to automatically calculate such partitions, and compares it to existing approaches. As a novel application, we describe a way to transform database queries into a suitable program form which then can be statically analysed to measure its leakage and to spot database inference threats. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.