Risk-aware information disclosure

Abstract

Risk-aware access control systems grant or deny access to resources based on some notion of risk. In this paper we propose a model that considers the risk of leaking privacy-critical information when querying, e.g., datasets containing personal information. While querying databases containing personal information it is current practice to assign all-or-nothing access to avoid the disclosure of sensitive information. Using our model, access-control decisions are based on the disclosure-risk associated with a data access request and, differently from existing models, we include adaptive anonymization operations as risk-mitigation methods. By applying these operations, a request that would otherwise be rejected, is permitted after reducing the risk associated with the returned dataset.