Section 6.8. Data Mining


6.8. Data Mining

Databases are great repositories of data. More data are being collected and saved (partly because the cost per megabyte of storage has fallen from dollars a few years ago to fractions of cents today). Networks and the Internet allow sharing of databases by people and in ways previously unimagined. But to find needles of information in those vast fields of haystacks of data requires intelligent analyzing and querying of the data. Indeed, a whole specialization, called data mining, has emerged. In a largely automated way, data mining applications sort and search thorough data.

Data mining uses statistics, machine learning, mathematical models, pattern recognition, and other techniques to discover patterns and relations on large datasets. (See, for example, [SEI04].) Data mining tools use association (one event often goes with another), sequences (one event often leads to another), classification (events exhibit patterns, for example coincidence), clustering (some items have similar characteristics), and forecasting (past events foretell future ones). The distinction between a database and a data mining application is becoming blurred; you can probably see how you could implement these techniques in ordinary database queries. Generally, database queries are manual, whereas data mining is more automatic. You could develop a database query to see what other products are bought by people who buy digital cameras and you might notice a preponderance of MP3 players in the result, but you would have to observe that relationship yourself. Data mining tools would present the significant relationships, not just between cameras and MP3 players, but also among bagels, airline tickets, and running shoes (if such a relationship existed). Humans have to analyze these correlations and determine what is significant.

Data mining presents probable relationships, but these are not necessarily cause-and-effect relationships. Suppose you analyzed data and found a correlation between sale of ice cream cones and death by drowning. You would not conclude that selling ice cream cones causes drowning (nor the converse). This distinction shows why humans must be involved in data mining to interpret the output: Only humans can discern that more variables are involved (for example, time of year or places where cones are sold).

Computer security gains from data mining. Data mining is widely used to analyze system data, for example, audit logs, to identify patterns related to attacks. Finding the precursors to an attack can help develop good prevention tools and techniques, and seeing the actions associated with an attack can help pinpoint vulnerabilities to control and damage that may have occurred. (One of the early works in this area is [LEE98], and entire conferences have been devoted to this important and maturing topic.)

In this section, however, we want to examine security problems involving data mining. Our now-familiar triad of confidentiality, integrity, and availability gives us clues to what these security issues are. Confidentiality concerns start with privacy but also include proprietary and commercially sensitive data and protecting the value of intellectual property: How do we control what is disclosed or derived? For integrity the important issue is correctnessincorrect data are both useless and potentially damaging, but we need to investigate how to gauge and ensure correctness. The availability consideration relates to both performance and structure: Combining databases not originally designed to be combined affects whether results can be obtained in a timely manner or even at all.

Privacy and Sensitivity

Because the goal of data mining is summary results, not individual data items, you would not expect a problem with sensitivity of individual data items. Unfortunately that is not true.

Individual privacy can suffer from the same kinds of inference and aggregation issues we studied for databases. Because privacy, specifically protecting what a person considers private information, is an important topic that relates to many areas of computer security, we study it in depth in Chapter 10.

Not only individual privacy is affected, however: Correlation by aggregation and inference can affect companies, organizations, and governments, too. Take, for example, a problem involving Firestone tires and the Ford Explorer vehicle. In May 2000, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) found a high incidence of tire failure on Ford Explorers fitted with Firestone tires. In certain conditions the Firestone tire tread separated; in certain conditions the Ford Explorer tipped over, and when the tread separated, the Ford was more likely to tip over [PUB01]. Consumers had complained to both Ford and Firestone since shortly after the tire and vehicle combination was placed on the market in 1990, but problems began to arise after a design change in 1995. Both companies had some evidence of the problem, but the NHTSA review of combined data better showed the correlation. Maintaining data on products' quality is a standard management practice. But the sensitivity of data in these databases would preclude much sharing. Even if a trustworthy neutral party could be found to mine the data, the owners would be reasonably concerned about what might be revealed. A large number of failures of one product could show a potential market weakness, or a series of small amounts of data could reveal test marketing activities to outsiders.

As we describe in Chapter 10, data about an entity (a person, company, organization, government body) may not be under that entity's control. Supermarkets collect product data from their shoppers, either from single visits or, more usefully, across all purchases for a customer who uses a "customer loyalty" card. In aggregate the data show marketing results useful to the manufacturers, advertising agencies, health researchers, government food agencies, financial institutions, researchers, and others. But these results were collected by the supermarket that can now do anything with the results, including sell them to manufacturers' competitors, for example.

There has been little research done on, or consideration given to, the sensitivity of data obtained from data mining. Clifton [CLI03, KAN04] has investigated the problem and proposed approaches that would produce close but not exact aggregate results that would preclude revealing sensitive information.

Data Correctness and Integrity

"Connecting the dots" is a phrase currently in vogue: It refers to drawing conclusions from relationships between discrete bits of data. But before we can connect dots, we need to do two other important things: collect and correct them. Data storage and computer technology is making it possible to collect more dots than ever before. But if your name or address has ever appeared incorrectly on a mailing list, you know that not all collected dots are accurate.

Correcting Mistakes in Data

Let's take the mailing list as an example. Your neighbor at 510 Thames Street brought a catalog for kitchen supplies to you at 519 Thames Street with your name but address 510 instead of 519; clearly someone made a mistake entering your address. You contact the kitchen supply place, and they are pleased to change your address on their records, because it is in their interest to send catalogs to people who are interested in them. But they bought your name and address along with others from a mailing list, and they have no incentive to contact the list owner to correct your master record. So additional catalogs continue to show up with your neighbor. You can see where this story leadsmistaken addresses never die.

Data mining exacerbates this situation. Databases need unique keys to help with structure and searches. But different databases may not have shared keys, so they use some data field as if it were a key. In our example case, this shared data field might be the address, so now your neighbor's address is associated with cooking (even if your neighbor needs a recipe to make tea). Fortunately, this example is of little consequence.

Consider terrorists, however. A government's intelligence service collects data on suspicious activities. But the names of suspicious persons are foreign, written in a different alphabet. When transformed into the government's alphabet, the transformation is irregular: One agent writes "Doe," another "Do," and another "Dho." Trying to use these names as common keys is difficult at best. One approach is phonetic. You cluster terms that sound similar. In this case, however, you might bring in "Jo," "Cho," "Toe," and "Tsiao," too, thereby implicating innocent people in the terrorist search. (In fact, this has happened; see Sidebar 6-6.) Assuming a human analyst could correctly separate all these and wanted to correct the Doe/Do/Doh databases, there are still two problems. First, the analyst might not have access to the original databases held by other agencies. Even if the analyst could get to the originals, the analyst would probably never learn where else these original databases had already been copied.

One important goal of databases is to have a record in one place so that one correction serves all uses. With data mining, a result is an aggregate from multiple databases. There is no natural way to work backward from the result to the amalgamated databases to find and correct errors.

Using Comparable Data

Data semantics is another important consideration when mining for data. Consider two geographical databases with data on family income. Except one database has income by dollar, and the other has the data in thousands of dollars. Even if the field names are the same, combining the raw data would result in badly distorted statistics. Consider another attribute rated high/medium/low in one database and on a numerical scale of 1 to 5 in another. Should high/medium/low be treated as 1/3/5? Even if analysts use that transformation, computing with some 3-point and some 5-point precision reduces the quality of the results. Or how can you meaningfully combine one database that has a particular attribute with another that does not?

Sidebar 6-6: Close, But No Cigar

Database management systems are excellent at finding matches: all people named Bfstplk or everyone whose age is under 125. They have limited capabilities to find "almost" matches: people whose names begin Hgw or have any four of five attributes. DBMSs have trouble finding names similar to d'Estaing or given a set of symptoms to determine a disease. DBMS vendors add domain-specific comparison engines to define "close," for pronunciation, orthography, features, or other pattern-matching operations. Dealing in imprecision, these engines can produce some spectacular failures.

Airport security databases are in the news in the United States. The plight of Senator Edward Kennedy and Representative John Lewis, both repeatedly caught for secondary screening presumably because their names resemble those of terrorists, would be worrying, except that their status in the government gave them clout to suggest the situation be fixed. Many other sound-alikes are not so well placed. And people with names like Michelle Green and David Nelson have no idea why their names trigger more scrutiny.


Eliminating False Matches

As we described earlier, coincidence is not correlation or causation; because two things occur together does not mean either causes the other. Data mining tries to highlight nonobvious connections in data, but data mining applications often use fuzzy logic to find these connections. These approaches will generate both false positives (false matches) and missed connections (false negatives). We need to be sensitive to the inherent inaccuracy of data mining approaches and guard against putting too much trust in the output of a data mining application just because "the computer said so."

Correctness of results and correct interpretation of those results are major security issues for data mining.

Availability of Data

Interoperability among distinct databases is a third security issue for data mining. As we just described, databases must have compatible structure and semantics to make data mining possible. Missing or incomparable data can make data mining results incorrect, so perhaps a better alternative is not to produce a result. But no result is not the same as a result of no correlation. As with single databases, data mining applications must deal with multiple sensitivities. Trying to combine databases on an attribute with more sensitive values can lead to no data and hence no matches.




Security in Computing
Security in Computing, 4th Edition
ISBN: 0132390779
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 171

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