Information disclosure by XPath queries

  • Authors:
  • Stefan Böttcher;Rita Steinmetz

  • Affiliations:
  • Computer Science, University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany;Computer Science, University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany

  • Venue:
  • SDM'06 Proceedings of the Third VLDB international conference on Secure Data Management
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Hospitals, organizations and companies are responsible keeping data and information about their customers private even if many internal employees have access to this data or information. When accused of an unauthorized disclosure of private information, it is important for the hospital to know which employees had the opportunity to disclose concrete private information. Our approach describes secret information in form of a secret query and performs two steps to detect which employees have used ‘suspicious' queries, i.e., queries the result of which allows the user to derive secret information. First, we analyze the structure of queries and of the secret query to exclude nonsuspicious queries. Second, we derive a formula from user query, query result and secret query, which is satisfiable if and only if the query is non-suspicious.