Security in Computing 5th Edition by Shari Lawrence Pfleeger, Charles P Pfleeger, Jonathan Margulies

Exercise 11

The response “sensitive value; response suppressed” is itself a disclosure. Suggest a manner in which a database management system could suppress responses that reveal sensitive information without disclosing that the responses to certain queries are sensitive.

Step 1 of 2

A data that should not be made public is called sensitive data. For example, the data related to defense department is sensitive.

Suppose data X is not sensitive, data Y is also not sensitive, but the combination of both the data is sensitive. It means that Z is sensitive data. If a user request for the X data by querying Y data, with intent to access Z data, then user must be blocked to access that data.

The sensitive data should not be accessed by any unauthorized person for any of the queries. Suppression and concealing are the controls that can also be used for the protection of the sensitive data. Suppression and concealing provides security to make it sure that the result of the requested query will not reflect the actual data stored on system.

The data is placed in different tables according to the level of sensitivity. All the tables are related through common key.