Read-down conflict-preserving serializability as a correctness criterion for multilevel-secure optimistic concurrency control: CSR/RD

Abstract

It is important to note that conflict-preserving serializability and related theory are artifacts of an era of database development where correctness alone was the overriding concern. With the advent of multilevel-secure databases, there is clearly a need to reexamine such theories. Any correctness criterion to govern transaction processing in the multilevel security context has to incorporate both secureness and correctness in a unified manner. This paper makes original contributions in two different but closely related areas to the optimistic concurrency control in multilevel-secure, single-version databases. First, read-down conflict-preserving serializability (CSR/RD) captures multilevel-secure database consistency requirements and secure transaction correctness properties via a single notion. Second, it presents a multilevel-secure optimistic concurrency control (MLS/OCC) scheme that has several desirable properties: If lower-level transactions were somehow allowed to continue with their executions in spite of the conflict with high-level transactions, covert timing-channel freeness would be satisfied. This sort of optimistic approach for conflict insensitiveness and the properties of non-blocking and deadlock freedom make the optimistic concurrency control scheme especially attractive to multilevel-secure transaction processing.