CAREER: XML Middleware for Privacy-Preserving Database Publishing

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

This project aims to help data owners deal with the ever-increasing demand of publishing proprietary data on the Web as XML, in useful yet controlled ways. One major thrust is the development of tools allowing data publishers to check that the privacy of sensitive data is not inadvertently violated by what is exposed to the outside view (even in indirect ways). The publisher specifies the sensitive data via a secret query S against the proprietary schema and the tools check that attackers cannot compute the answer to S (exactly or approximately) from the published data. The research approach includes development of a hierarchy of privacy guarantees, qualified by the accuracy of the approximation and the attacker's computational resources. The second project goal is the delivery of tools for integrating web publishing with the limited query interfaces supported by current "web services" technologies. The focus is on web services, which implement large sets of parameterized XML queries. The project seeks solutions for (i) the query set specification using concise, intuitive visual paradigms and (ii) the rewriting of client queries to execution plans, which invoke only supported queries. The developed technologies will benefit all categories of data owners who publish on the Web, from commercial/governmental/academic institutions to private individuals. Some tools will serve as course materials for undergraduate and graduate database classes, but also for a compiler class at UCSD. Software and course materials will be freely distributed for non-commercial purposes. The project Web site http://www.db.ucsd.edu/people/alin/nsf-career will be used for the results dissemination.