Maintaining integrity constraints and security in real-time database systems

Abstract

Many real-time database systems are contained in environments that exhibit restricted access to information, such as government agencies, hospitals and military institutions, where mandatory access control for security is required. In addition to such security constraints, real-time database systems have real-time integrity constraints. These real-time constraints require deadlines to be met and data to be temporally consistent. Conventional multi-level secure database models are inadequate for time-critical applications and conventional real-time database models do not support security constraints. We propose a new concurrency control algorithm for secure real-time databases. We implement the algorithm and study the performance using a real-time database system simulation model. Results show that the algorithm performs fairly well in terms of security and timeliness compared to the non-secure algorithm. We argue and show that achieving more security does not necessarily mean a great deal of sacrifice in maintaining real-time constraints.