Realizing privacy-preserving features in hippocratic databases

Preserving privacy has become a crucial requirement for operating a business that manages personal data. Hippocratic databases have been proposed to answer this requirement through a database design that includes responsibility for the privacy of data as a founding tenet. We identify, study, and implement several privacy-preserving features that extend the previous work on Limiting Disclosure in Hippocratic databases. These features include the support of multiple policy versions, retention time, generalization hierarchies, and multiple SQL operations. The proposed features facilitate in making Hippocratic databases one step closer to fitting real-world scenarios. We present the design and implementation guidelines of each of the proposed features. The evaluation of the effect in performance shows that the cost of these extensions is small and scales well to large databases.