Compact access control labeling for efficient secure XML query evaluation

Abstract

Fine-grained access controls for XML define access privileges at the granularity of individual XML nodes. In this paper, we present a fine-grained access control mechanism for XML data. This mechanism exploits the structural locality of access rights as well as correlations among the access rights of different users to produce a compact physical encoding of the access control data. This encoding can be constructed using a single pass over a labeled XML database. It is block-oriented and suitable for use in secondary storage. We show how this access control mechanism can be integrated with a next-of-kin (NoK) XML query processor to provide efficient, secure query evaluation. The key idea is that the structural information of the nodes and their encoded access controls are stored together, allowing the access privileges to be checked efficiently. Our evaluation shows that the access control mechanism introduces little overhead into the query evaluation process.