An information theoretic framework for web inference detection
Hoi Le Thi, Reihaneh Safavi–Naini · 2012
Document redaction is widely used to protect sensitive information in published documents. In a basic redaction system, sensitive and identifying terms are removed from the document. Web-based inference is an attack on redaction systems whereby the redacted document is linked with other publicly available documents to infer the removed parts. Web-based inference also provides an approach for detecting unwanted inferences and so constructing secure redaction systems. Previous works on web-based inference used general keyword extraction methods for document representation. We propose a systematic approach, based on information theoretic concepts and measures, to rank the words in a document for purpose of inference detection. We extend our results to the case of multiple sensitive words and propose a metric that takes into account possible relationship of the sensitive words and results in an effective and efficient inference detection system.