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The Mask of ZoRRo: preventing information leakage from documents

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Abstract

In today’s enterprise world, information about business entities such as a customer’s or patient’s name, address, and social security number is often present in both relational databases as well as content repositories. Information about such business entities is generally well protected in databases by well-defined and fine-grained access control. However, current document retrieval systems do not provide user-specific, fine-grained redaction of documents to prevent leakage of information about business entities from documents. Leaving companies with only two choices: either providing complete access to a document, risking potential information leakage, or prohibiting access to the document altogether, accepting potentially negative impact on business processes. In this paper, we present ZoRRo, an add-on for document retrieval systems to dynamically redact sensitive information of business entities referenced in a document based on access control defined for the entities. ZoRRo exploits database systems’ fine-grained, label-based access-control mechanism to identify and redact sensitive information from unstructured text, based on the access privileges of the user viewing it. To make on-the-fly redaction feasible, ZoRRo exploits the concept of \(k\)-safety in combination with Lucene-based indexing and scoring. We demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of ZoRRo through a detailed experimental study.

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Notes

  1. Name withheld due to legal and privacy reasons.

  2. http://www.tpc.org/tpcds/.

  3. The original as well as the redacted documents can be downloaded from https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_Kz16TTj09IMzVLRGdFMkJwZFU/edit?usp=sharing.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IBM Research, Bangalore, India

    Prasad M. Deshpande, Salil Joshi & Karin Murthy

  2. IBM Research, Delhi, India

    Mukesh Mohania

  3. Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi, India

    Prateek Dewan

  4. IBM, Bangalore, India

    Sheshnarayan Agrawal

Authors
  1. Prasad M. Deshpande
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  2. Salil Joshi
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  3. Prateek Dewan
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  4. Karin Murthy
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  5. Mukesh Mohania
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  6. Sheshnarayan Agrawal
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Correspondence to Salil Joshi.

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Deshpande, P.M., Joshi, S., Dewan, P. et al. The Mask of ZoRRo: preventing information leakage from documents. Knowl Inf Syst 45, 705–730 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-014-0811-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-014-0811-6

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