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Security of statistical databases: multidimensional transformation

Published: 01 December 1980 Publication History

Abstract

Statistical evaluation of databases which contain personal records may entail risks for the confidentiality of the individual records. The risk has increased with the availability of flexible interactive evaluation programs which permit the use of trackers, the most dangerous class of snooping tools known. A class of trackers, called union trackers, is described. They permit reconstruction of the entire database without supplementary knowledge and include the general tracker recently described as a special case. For many real statistical databases the overwhelming majority of definable sets of records will form trackers. For such databases a random search for a tracker is likely to succeed rapidly. Individual trackers are redefined and counted and their cardinalities are investigated. If there are n records in the database, then most individual trackers employ innocent cardinalities near n/3, making them difficult to detect. Disclosure with trackers usually requires little effort per retrieved data element.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Database Systems
ACM Transactions on Database Systems  Volume 5, Issue 4
Dec. 1980
128 pages
ISSN:0362-5915
EISSN:1557-4644
DOI:10.1145/320610
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 01 December 1980
Published in TODS Volume 5, Issue 4

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  1. confidentiality
  2. database security
  3. security
  4. statistical database
  5. tracker

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