Rule Configuration Checking in Secure Cooperative Data Access

In this paper, we consider an environment where a group of parties have their own relational databases and provide restricted access to other parties. In order to implement desired business services, each party defines a set of authorization rules over the join of basic relations, and these rules can be viewed as the configurations of the accessible information in the cooperative data access environment. However, authorization rules are likely to be developed by each enterprise somewhat independently based on their business needs and may not be sufficiently well defined to be enforceable. That is, the rules may be missing some crucial access capabilities that are essential for implementing the desired restrictions. In this paper, we propose a mechanism to check the rule enforceability for each given authorization rule.