Web Server Security and Database Server Security
Databases involve distributed updates and queries, while supporting confidentiality, integrity, availability, and privacy (Goodrich, & Tamassia, 2011). This entails robust access control as well as tools for detection and recovering from errors (2011).
When database information is masked, there is still a possibility of an attacker garnishing sensitive data from additional database information that is available, this can be achieved and called an inference attack (2011). For databases, strategies have been designed to mitigate against inference attacks.
Cell suppression is a technique used to combat an inference attack, by removing various cells in a database, and are left blank for published versions (2011). The objective is to suppress the critical cells that have relatively important information in them from being obtained in an attack (2011). Another strategy is called Generalization, and this involves replacing published versions of database information with general values (2011). Such as stating a specific date of birth with a range of years, thus a person born in 1990 could be generalized as a range 1985-1992. The critical values are intertwined with the actual values, so they are less discernable in an inference attack (2011).
A Noise Addition technique can also be utilized. This requires adding randomized values to real values in a published database (2011). This provides “noise” for all the records of the same attributes, such as adding a negative to a real number, -9 to 9. This obscures unique numbers while leaving the value for the average unaltered (2011). Additional techniques such as Obfuscation for protecting an individual’s privacy, Anonymization, and Differential privacy are also included (2011).
Various high-profile hacking attacks have proven that web security remains the most