Novel Approaches to Handle the Inference Problem

It is possible for users of any database management system to draw inferences from the information that they obtain from the databases. The inferred knowledge could depend only on the data obtained from the database system or it could depend on some prior knowledge possessed by the user in addition to the data obtained from the database system. As stated in Chapter 4, the inference process can be harmful if the inferred knowledge is something that the user is not authorized to acquire. That is, a user acquiring information that he or she is not authorized to know has come to be known as the inference problem in database security.