Secrecy-Preserving Reasoning Over Entailment Systems Theory and Applications

Privacy, copyright, security and other concerns make it essential for many distributed web applications to support selective sharing of information while, at the same time, protecting sensitive knowledge. Secrecy-preserving reasoning refers to the answering of queries against a knowledge base involving inference that uses sensitive knowledge without revealing it. We present a general framework for secrecy-preserving reasoning over arbitrary entailment systems. This framework enables reasoning with hierarchical ontologies, propo-sitional logic knowledge bases (over arbitrary logics) and RDFS knowledge bases containing sensitive in-formation that needs to be protected. We provide an algorithm that, given a knowledge base over an ef-fectively enumerable entailment system, and a secrecy set over it, defines a maximally informative secrecy-preserving reasoner. Secrecy-preserving mappings be-tween knowledge bases that allow reusing reasoners across knowledge bases are introduced. 1