XGuard: a system for publishing XML documents without information leakage in the presence of data inference

Abstract

In data publishing, if the data is published carelessly, public users could use common knowledge to infer more information from the published data, causing leakage of sensitive information. To address related research challenges, we develop a system called XGuard, which can help data owners publish a partial XML document without leaking sensitive information, even if public users can do inference. Specifically, the system has the following functionalities. i) It allows the data owner to define sensitive information and specify common knowledge as XML constraints. ii) Given a partial document, the system can validate if the document can cause information leakage due to common knowledge and how much data can be leaked. iii) The system can help the data owner interactively analyze the data inference and produce a secure valid partial document using the algorithms.