Extending query rewriting techniques for fine-grained access control

ABSTRACT

Current day database applications, with large numbers of users, require fine-grained access control mechanisms, at the level of individual tuples, not just entire relations/views, to control which parts of the data can be accessed by each user. Fine-grained access control is often enforced in the application code, which has numerous drawbacks; these can be avoided by specifying/enforcing access control at the database level. We present a novel fine-grained access control model based on authorization views that allows "authorization-transparent" querying; that is, user queries can be phrased in terms of the database relations, and are valid if they can be answered using only the information contained in these authorization views. We extend earlier work on authorization-transparent querying by introducing a new notion of validity, conditional validity. We give a powerful set of inference rules to check for query validity. We demonstrate the practicality of our techniques by describing how an existing query optimizer can be extended to perform access control checks by incorporating these inference rules.

REFERENCES

• 1: The Virtual Private Database in Oracle9ir2: An Oracle Technical White Paper http://otn.oracle.com/deploy/security/oracle9ir2/pdf/vpd9ir2twp.pdf.
• 2: Gail-Joon Ahn , Ravi Sandhu, Role-based authorization constraints specification, ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC), v.3 n.4, p.207-226, Nov. 2000 [doi>10.1145/382912.382913]
• 3: Randall G. Bello , Karl Dias , Alan Downing , James J. Feenan, Jr. , James L. Finnerty , William D. Norcott , Harry Sun , Andrew Witkowski , Mohamed Ziauddin, Materialized Views in Oracle, Proceedings of the 24rd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, p.659-664, August 24-27, 1998
• 4: Alexander Brodsky , Csilla Farkas , Sushil Jajodia, Secure Databases: Constraints, Inference Channels, and Monitoring Disclosures, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, v.12 n.6, p.900-919, November 2000 [doi>10.1109/69.895801]
• 5: Silvana Castano , Maria Grazia Fugini , Giancarlo Martella , Pierangela Samarati, Database security, ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., New York, NY, 1995
• 6: Surajit Chaudhuri , Ravi Krishnamurthy , Spyros Potamianos , Kyuseok Shim, Optimizing Queries with Materialized Views, Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Data Engineering, p.190-200, March 06-10, 1995
• 7: Surajit Chaudhuri, Optimization of real conjunctive queries, Proceedings of the twelfth ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART symposium on Principles of database systems, p.59-70, May 25-28, 1993, Washington, D.C., United States [doi>10.1145/153850.153856]
• 8: Sara Cohen , Werner Nutt , Alexander Serebrenik, Rewriting aggregate queries using views, Proceedings of the eighteenth ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART symposium on Principles of database systems, p.155-166, May 31-June 03, 1999, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/303976.303992]
• 9: D. Denning. Commutative filters for reducing inference threats in multilevel database systems. In IEEE Symp. on Security and Privacy, pages 134--146, 1985.
• 10: Csilla Farkas , Sushil Jajodia, The inference problem: a survey, ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter, v.4 n.2, p.6-11, December 2002 [doi>10.1145/772862.772864]
• 11: Virgil Gligor, Characteristics of role-based access control, Proceedings of the first ACM Workshop on Role-based access control, p.10-es, November 30-December 02, 1995, Gaithersburg, Maryland, United States [doi>10.1145/270152.270169]
• 12: Jonathan Goldstein , Per-Åke Larson, Optimizing queries using materialized views: a practical, scalable solution, Proceedings of the 2001 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, p.331-342, May 21-24, 2001, Santa Barbara, California, United States
• 13: Goetz Graefe , William J. McKenna, The Volcano Optimizer Generator: Extensibility and Efficient Search, Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Data Engineering, p.209-218, April 19-23, 1993
• 14: Ashish Gupta , Venky Harinarayan , Dallan Quass, Aggregate-Query Processing in Data Warehousing Environments, Proceedings of the 21th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, p.358-369, September 11-15, 1995
• 15: Alon Y. Halevy, Answering queries using views: A survey, The VLDB Journal — The International Journal on Very Large Data Bases, v.10 n.4, p.270-294, December 2001 [doi>10.1007/s007780100054]
• 16: Michael A. Harrison , Walter L. Ruzzo , Jeffrey D. Ullman, Protection in operating systems, Communications of the ACM, v.19 n.8, p.461-471, Aug. 1976 [doi>10.1145/360303.360333]
• 17: Sushil Jajodia , Pierangela Samarati , Maria Luisa Sapino , V. S. Subrahmanian, Flexible support for multiple access control policies, ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), v.26 n.2, p.214-260, June 2001 [doi>10.1145/383891.383894]
• 18: Sushil Jajodia , Ravi Sandhu, Toward a multilevel secure relational data model, Proceedings of the 1991 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, p.50-59, May 29-31, 1991, Denver, Colorado, United States
• 19: Sushil Jajodia , Duminda Wijesekera, Recent advances in access control models, Proceedings of the fifteenth annual working conference on Database and application security, p.3-15, July 15-18, 2001, Niagara, Ontario, Canada
• 20: Amihai Motro, An Access Authorization Model for Relational Databases Based on Algebraic Manipulation of View Definitions, Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Data Engineering, p.339-347, February 06-10, 1989
• 21: Amihai Motro, Panorama: a database system that annotates its answers to queries with their properties, Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, v.7 n.1, p.51-73, Sept. 1996 [doi>10.1007/BF00125522]
• 22: A. Rosenthal and E. Sciore. View security as the basis for data warehouse security. In Intl. Workshop on Design and Management of Data Warehouses (DMDW), 2000.
• 23: A. Rosenthal and E. Sciore. Administering permissions for distributed data: Factoring and automated inference. In IFIP 11.3 Working Conf. in Database Security, 2001.
• 24: Arnon Rosenthal , Edward Sciore , Vinti Doshi, Security Administration for Federations, Warehouses, and other Derived Data, Proceedings of the IFIP WG 11.3 Thirteenth International Conference on Database Security: Research Advances in Database and Information Systems Security, p.209-223, July 26-28, 1999
• 25: Prasan Roy , S. Seshadri , S. Sudarshan , Siddhesh Bhobe, Efficient and extensible algorithms for multi query optimization, Proceedings of the 2000 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, p.249-260, May 15-18, 2000, Dallas, Texas, United States
• 26: Divesh Srivastava , Shaul Dar , H. V. Jagadish , Alon Y. Levy, Answering Queries with Aggregation Using Views, Proceedings of the 22th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, p.318-329, September 03-06, 1996
• 27: Ramana Yerneni , Chen Li , Hector Garcia-Molina , Jeffrey Ullman, Computing capabilities of mediators, Proceedings of the 1999 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, p.443-454, May 31-June 03, 1999, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
• 28: Markos Zaharioudakis , Roberta Cochrane , George Lapis , Hamid Pirahesh , Monica Urata, Answering complex SQL queries using automatic summary tables, Proceedings of the 2000 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, p.105-116, May 15-18, 2000, Dallas, Texas, United States