The Tao of Inference in Privacy-Protected Databases

Summary: Introduces the analytically optimal multinomial attack to recover PRE-encrypted attributes, outperforming prior heuristics 16×. Cross-column inference plus ML and record linkage reconstructs semantically encrypted/redacted fields, including medical diagnoses, with up to 97% accuracy. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: 11842
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2018
Pagerank: 0.00010037562
Overall Rank: 1,674 | 88.52%
DOI: 10.14778/3236187.3236217

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Vincent Bindschaedler (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
2. Paul Grubbs (Cornell University)
3. David Cash (University of Chicago)
4. Thomas Ristenpart (Cornell University)
5. Vitaly Shmatikov (Cornell University)

BibTeX Citation

@article{bindschaedler_vldb18,
        title = {{The Tao of Inference in Privacy-Protected Databases}},
        author = {Bindschaedler, Vincent and Grubbs, Paul and Cash, David and Ristenpart, Thomas and Shmatikov, Vitaly},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '18},
        volume = {11},
        number = {11},
        pages = {1715--1728},
        doi = {10.14778/3236187.3236217},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3236187.3236217},
        year = {2018}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 12 of 12 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,984	Shrinkwrap: Efficient SQL Query Processing in Differentially Private Data Federations	2019	VLDB	9.3540912e-05
2,417	Towards Practical Oblivious Join	2022	SIGMOD	8.6061949e-05
3,464	Building Enclave-Native Storage Engines for Practical Encrypted Databases	2021	VLDB	7.3916399e-05
5,128	A Comparative Evaluation of Order-Revealing Encryption Schemes and Secure Range-Query Protocols	2019	VLDB	6.355964e-05
5,645	OpBoost: A Vertical Federated Tree Boosting Framework Based on Order-Preserving Desensitization	2023	VLDB	6.1366186e-05
6,171	Longshot: Indexing Growing Databases using MPC and Differential Privacy	2023	VLDB	5.9513399e-05
6,537	Range Search over Encrypted Multi-Attribute Data	2023	VLDB	5.8478276e-05
7,723	Frequency-Hiding Order-Preserving Encryption with Small Client Storage	2021	VLDB	5.5585313e-05
8,640	Pantheon: Private Retrieval from Public Key-Value Store	2023	VLDB	5.3944963e-05
9,070	Integrity-based Attacks for Encrypted Databases and Implications	2021	CIDR	5.3251649e-05
11,457	Frequency-revealing attacks against Frequency-hiding Order-preserving Encryption	2023	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,699	Cryptanalysis of An Encrypted Database in SIGMOD '14	2021	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
310	Order Preserving Encryption for Numeric Data	2004	SIGMOD	0.00021766789
412	Processing Analytical Queries over Encrypted Data	2013	VLDB	0.00018901853
876	Orthogonal Security With Cipherbase	2013	CIDR	0.00013467554

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	9,001	Dynamic Anonymization: Accurate Statistical Analysis with Privacy Preservation	2008	SIGMOD
2	3,468	Security and Inference in Multilevel Database and Knowledge-Base Systems	1987	SIGMOD
3	7,850	Differentially Private Data Release over Multiple Tables	2023	PODS
4	3,232	Privacy-preserving Anonymization of Set-valued Data	2008	VLDB
5	8,403	Minimal Data Upgrading to Prevent Inference and Association Attacks	1999	PODS
6	123	Revealing Information while Preserving Privacy	2003	PODS
7	5,494	rho-uncertainty: Inference-Proof Transaction Anonymization	2010	VLDB
8	7,115	Efficient Secure Query Evaluation over Encrypted XML Databases	2006	VLDB
9	12,809	Privacy in Data Systems	2003	PODS
10	9,070	Integrity-based Attacks for Encrypted Databases and Implications	2021	CIDR