A Method for Protecting Access Pattern in Outsourced Data

Protecting the information access pattern, which means preventing the disclosure of data and structural details of databases, is very important in working with data, especially in the cases of outsourced databases and databases with Internet access. The protection of the information access pattern indicates that mere data confidentiality is not sufficient and the privacy of queries and accesses must also be ensured. This is because by observing users' queries, attackers can extract the relationships between the queries and obtain a knowledge of the database to decrypt details of the database structure. In this paper, for the outsourcing model, the storing methods that are appropriate for providing confidentiality and protecting the access pattern are described. Finally, a segmentation-based approach is presented to protect the access pattern for outsourced data. Compared to previous methods, experiment results indicate our proposed method provides an acceptable level of preventing the information disclosure as well as not imposing large overhead of storing, computation, and communication.