Assessing the Exposure to Public Knowledge in Policy-Protected Description Logic Ontologies

Abstract

We propose a general framework for assessing the exposure of sensitive knowledge in policy-protected knowledge bases (KBs), where knowledge is represented as logical theories and data protection policies are defined declaratively using epistemic dependencies. The framework models scenarios in which confidential parts of the KB may be publicly known due to security breaches. We study two fundamental decision problems: determining whether the exposed knowledge violates the data protection policy (leakage), and whether there exists a secure view of the KB that complies with the policy. We analyze the computational complexity (specifically, data complexity) of these problems, focusing on the DL-Lite_R and EL_\bot Description Logics. Our findings show that, for DL-Lite_R with restricted forms of policy, both the problems can be efficiently solved through query rewriting methods. For EL_\bot, we establish conditions for tractable computational bounds. Our results highlight the potential of this framework for practical applications in confidentiality-preserving knowledge management.