The objective of this research is the development of inference analysis and detection techniques for databases. An organization could properly use the protection facilities provided by a multilevel secure database management system and still be at risk due to the ability of an adversary to use data accessible to him or her to deduce more highly classified data using inference techniques. This research is addressing the inference detection problem through a conceptual graph based approach. In support of this laboratory, this research has developed a schema level analysis tool called Merlin and an instance level analysis tool called Wizard. To provide databases instances which contain inferences, this research has developed a test database generation tool called Genie.
Research is ongoing to refine inference detection techniques for instance-level analysis.
This research adapted an algorithm from another application that provides a 14 times speedup in processing speed to detect second path inferences. This algorithm is embedded in a schema-level second path detection tool called Merlin. The Genie database has been used to test an initial version of Wizard, an instance-level inference detection tool.