ABSTRACT

The great Indian sage Maharshi Vyasa happens to have assimilated and embodied all forms
of knowledge that ever existed in the cosmos which makes rest of us mere copycats and
perhaps traitors. Then who else can understand the ways of traitors better than us!

Information age demands omnipresence of data. An enormous growth in internet

usage has resulted in to great amounts of digital data to handle. Data sharing has become
necessary and essential. Data owners want the data to be secured and perennially available.
Large data sets are created, maintained and outsourced to the third party experts for
data mining. Knowledge and patterns are extracted by using advanced data mining
algorithms that assist the decision makers to ensure quick, correct and effective
decisions to be made in this competitive world.
The outsourcing of these large data sets faces the problem of theft and loss of
ownership. Data protection and any violations thereby become crucial. The problem of
data theft can be handled by fingerprinting i.e. embedding buyer specific marks along
with ownership identification marks which further leads to the challenge of
knowledge preservation.
Present work proposes a novel fingerprint insertion scheme to provide protection for
numeric databases (with or without primary key) with knowledge preservation,
collusion avoidance and improved efficiency over the existing system. Unique
fingerprints for different buyers generated using Tardos scheme are applied and
knowledge preservation is achieved by optimizing the error to be inserted using
Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), a nature – inspired optimization algorithm.
Collusion attack, well-known in the context of fingerprinting techniques is avoided.
The resilience of the proposed system against several attacks like additive attack,
tuple addition, tuple deletion and tuple modification is evaluated experimentally.

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