Further results on the security of partitioned dynamic statistical databases

  • Authors:
  • Mary McLeish

  • Affiliations:
  • Univ. of Guelph, Guelph, Ont., Canada

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS)
  • Year:
  • 1989

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Abstract

Partitioning is a highly secure approach to protecting statistical databases. When updates are introduced, security depends on putting restrictions on the sizes of partition sets which may be queried. To overcome this problem, attempts have been made to add “dummy” records. Recent work has shown that this leads to high information loss.This paper reconsiders the restrictions on the size of partitioning sets required to achieve a high level of security. Updates of two records at a time were studied earlier, and security was found to hold if the sizes of the partition sets were kept even. In this paper an extended model is presented, allowing very general updates to be performed. The security problem is thoroughly studied, giving if and only if conditions. The earlier result is shown to be part of a corollary to the main theorem of this paper. Alternatives to adding dummy records are presented and the practical implications of the theory for the database manager are discussed.