Secure transaction management and query processing in multilevel secure database systems

In a multilevel secure database system, every data item is assigned a classification level and each user that accesses the data has a clearance level. Users can read data items that exist at a lower level and write at their own level. In such systems multilevel databases may be partitioned and stored as single-level databases. To construct a multilevel relation, repeated joins of different single level base relations are taken, thus resulting in delayed query response time. However, trying t o accelerate transactions might establish covert channels which can send high level sensitive information to low level users. This paper describes secure algorithms for both concurrency control and query processing in such systems and shows how these two techniques could be integrated together to give best performance. The data structures, needed in these algorithms, are based on bit vector techniques developed in [13], and [14]. Our method accelerates both read-only (queries) and read-write transactions in a secure and correct manner.

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