Inference Control in Data Integration Systems

Specifying a global policy in a data integration system in a traditional way would not necessarily offer a sound and efficient solution to deal with the inference problem [8]. This is mainly due to the fact that data dependencies between distributed data sets are not taken into account when local policies attached to local sources are defined. In this paper, by using formal concept analysis, we propose a methodology, together with a set of algorithms that can help to detect security breaches by reasoning about semantic constraints. Given a set of local policies, an initial global policy and data dependencies, we propose an approach that allows the security administrator to derive a set of queries so that when their results are combined they could lead to security breaches. We detect the set of additional rules which will be used to extend the policy of the mediator in order to block security breaches. We also discuss a set of experiments we conducted.