Query Auditing for Protecting Max/Min Values of Sensitive Attributes in Statistical Databases

In this paper, we define a novel setting for query auditing, where instead of detecting or preventing the disclosure of individual sensitive values, we want to detect or prevent the disclosure of aggregate values in the database. More specifically, we study the problem of detecting or preventing the disclosure of the maximum (minimum) value in the database, when the querier is allowed to issue average queries to the database. We propose efficient off-line and on-line query auditors for this problem in the full disclosure model, and an efficient simulatable on-line query auditor in the partial disclosure model.