Data Security and Chase

Abstract

This article describes requirements and approaches necessary for ensuring data confidentiality in knowledge discovery systems. Data mining systems should provide knowledge extracted from their data which can be used to identify underlying trends and patterns, but the knowledge should not be used to compromise data confidentiality. Confidentiality for sensitive data is achieved, in general, by hiding them from unauthorized users in conventional database systems (e.g., data encryption and/or access control methods can be considered as data hiding). However, it is not sufficient to hide the confidential data in knowledge discovery systems (KDSs) due to Chase (Dardzinska & Ras, 2003a, 2003c). Chase is a missing value prediction tool enhanced by data mining technologies. For example, if an attribute is incomplete in an information system, we can use Chase to approximate the missing values to make the attribute more complete. It is also used to answer user queries containing non-local attributes (Ras & Joshi, 1997). If attributes in queries are locally unknown, we search for their definitions from KDSs and use the results to replace the non-local part of the query.