Client-Based Access Control Management for XML documents

Abstract

This chapter proposes an efficient client-based evaluator of access control rules for regulating access to XML documents. This evaluator takes benefit from a dedicated index to quickly converge toward the authorized parts of a potentially-streaming document. Additional security mechanisms guarantee that prohibited data can never be disclosed during the processing and that the input document is protected from any form of tampering. Investigations on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach. Access control management is one of the foundation stone of database systems and is traditionally performed by the servers. There are many situations where access control rules are user specific, dynamic, and then difficult to predict. The access control rules being more complex, the encrypted content and the licenses are managed through different channels, allowing different privileges to be exercised by different users on the same encrypted content. In the meantime, software and hardware architectures are rapidly evolving to integrate elements of trust in client devices.