Introduction to Statistical Database Security

Statistical database security deals with the problem of protecting the confidentiality of individual records used for statistical analysis. This problem has been investigated since early '70s, but has recently been escalated by both recent technological advances that have enabled masive data collection and processing, and social awarnes and sensitivity to privacy issues. This paper provides an introduction to the problem of statistical database security. It describes an abstract statistical database model, security concepts as well as existing control techniques. Special attention is payed to maximising the amount of statistics available from the database, while keeping the database secure.