Implementing security technique on generic database

Abstract

Database maintenance has become an important issue in today's world. Addition or alteration of any field to an existing database schema cost high to a corporation. Whenever new data types are introduced or existing types are modified in a conventional relational database system, the physical design of the database must be changed accordingly. For this reason, it is desirable that a database should be flexible and allow for modification and addition of new types of data without having to change the physical database schema. The generic model is designed to allow a wide variety of data to be accommodated in a general purpose set of data structures. This generic mechanism for data storage has been used in various information systems such as banking, defense, e-commerce and especially healthcare domain. But, addressing security on generic databases is a challenging task. To the best of our knowledge, applying security on generic database has not been addressed yet. Various cryptographic security techniques, such as hashing algorithms, public and private key algorithms, have already been applied on a database. In this paper, we are proposing an extra layer of security to the existing databases, through Negative Database technique. The advantages of the negative database approach on generic database has been demonstrated and emphasized. Correspondingly, the complexity of the proposed algorithm has been computed.