Building A Security-Aware Query Answering System Based On Hierarchical Data Masking

Knowledge based query answering system takes advantage of data mining techniques to provide answers to user queries that involve incomplete or foreign attribute values. However, such process may cause a security issue when the system contains confidential data required to be protected. The confidential data as well as other values can be treated as missing or incomplete, and vulnerable to improper disclosure of their true values. To minimize such vulnerability, data transformation techniques are often utilized. In this paper, we present a method that exploits hierarchical structure of attributes to minimize the changes from the original information system while accommodating a given security requirement. In particular, our method replaces the existing data with more generalized ones in such a way that the value replacement cannot be used to predict the confidential data.

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