An Inference Attack is a data mining

Data mining

Data mining , a relatively young and interdisciplinary field of computer science is the process of discovering new patterns from large data sets involving methods at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics and database systems...

 technique performed by analyzing data in order to illegitimately gain knowledge about a subject or database. A subject's sensitive information

Information

Information in its most restricted technical sense is a message or collection of messages that consists of an ordered sequence of symbols, or it is the meaning that can be interpreted from such a message or collection of messages. Information can be recorded or transmitted. It can be recorded as...

 can be considered as leaked if an adversary can infer its real value with a high confidence. This is an example of breached information security

Information security

Information security means protecting information and information systems from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification, perusal, inspection, recording or destruction....

. An Inference attack occurs when a user is able to infer from trivial information more robust information about a database without directly accessing it. The object of Inference attacks is to piece together information at one security level to determine a fact that should be protected at a higher security level.

Countermeasures

Computer security inference control is the attempt to prevent users to infer classified information from rightfully accessible chunks of information with lower classification. Computer security professionals install protocols into databases to prevent inference attacks by software but to date there is no software or hardware, such as an anti-inference engine, that delivers this countermeasure against a human inference engine

Inference engine

In computer science, and specifically the branches of knowledge engineering and artificial intelligence, an inference engine is a computer program that tries to derive answers from a knowledge base. It is the "brain" that expert systems use to reason about the information in the knowledge base for...

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