Guest Editors' Introduction to the Special Issue on Secure Database Systems Technology

Abstract

INCE the U.S. Air Force Summer Study in 1982, several S research and development efforts in secure database management systems have been initiated. These include efforts in Secure Relational DBMS, Secure Object-Oriented DBMS, Secure Distributed IDBMS, and other topics such as inference and aggregation, policies and models, polyinstantiation, concurrency control, auditing, and role-based security. In addition to military applications, security for commercial applications such as medical information systems and banking systems have received increased attention in recent years. Since security is becoming increasingly important to many government as well as commercial organizations, and database technology is a necessity for these organizations, it is important for the various communities to be aware of the developments made in securing database systems. Due to the considerable pressing interest and concern in this area, this special issue of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering is devoted to this topic. This issue consists of seven papers addressing a variety of topics in secure database systems technology. The first paper by Qian and Lunt describes a MAC policy framework for multilevel relational databases. Much of the work in multilevel secure database management systems has focussed on the relational model. Various prototype systems as well as commercial products have been developed. This paper presents a formal framework to specify mandatory access control policies for relational database systems. More recently quite a few efforts have been reported on multilevel secure object-oriented database management systems. One such effort is reported in the second paper by Thomas and Sandhu. ‘They propose a trusted subject architecture for designing multilevel secure objectoriented databases. Transaction processing in multilevel secure database management systems is a major issue. Concurrency control algorithms such as locking are known to cause covert channels. The goal in secure transaction processing is to ensure consistency as well as security. The third paper by Smith, Blaustein, . Jajodia, and Notargiacomo describes a