Everything that is not important: Negative databases [Research Frontier]

According to the self-nonself discrimination theory, from a data representation point of view, the collection of all immune cells comprises a distributed model of what self is not; if the model is good enough, then it is also a model of self - the collection of all immune cells define what self is by individually specifying what it is not. The work reviewed in this paper is predominantly inspired by this image and asks whether the same principle can be applied to a database - here viewed as a list of strings - and how the properties of representing a database negatively can be leveraged for its security.