Using Two-Phase Commit for Crash Recovery in Federated Multilevel Secure Database Management Systems

In a federated database management system, a collection of autonomous database management systems (DBMSs) agree to cooperate to make data available for sharing and to process distributed retrieval and update queries. Distributed transactions can access data across multiple DBMSs. Securing such an environment requires a method that coordinates processing of these distributed requests to provide distributed transaction atomicity without security compromise. An open question is how much of its scheduling process an individual DBMS must expose to the federation in order to allow sufficient coordination of distributed transactions. In this paper, we address the application of the two-phase commit protocol, which is emerging as the dominant method of providing transaction atomicity for crash recovery in the conventional (single-level) distributed DBMS area, to the federated multilevel secure (MLS) DBMS environment. We discuss the limits of its applicability and identify the conditions that must be satisfied by the individual DBMSs in order to participate in the federation.

[1]  Dennis McLeod,et al.  A federated architecture for information management , 1985, TOIS.

[2]  Patrick Valduriez,et al.  Principles of Distributed Database Systems , 1990 .

[3]  H. Garcia-Molina,et al.  Reliable distributed database management , 1987, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[4]  Butler W. Lampson,et al.  Crash Recovery in a Distributed Data Storage System , 1981 .

[5]  Stefano Ceri,et al.  Distributed Databases: Principles and Systems , 1984 .

[6]  Oliver Costich Transaction Processing Using an Untrusted Scheduler in a Multilevel Database with Replicated Architecture , 1991, DBSec.

[7]  Sushil Jajodia,et al.  A Timestamp Ordering Algorithm for Secure, Single-Version, Multi-Level Databases , 1991, DBSec.

[8]  Glenn H. MacEwen,et al.  Effects of Distributed System Technology on Database Security: A Survey , 1988, DBSec.

[9]  Sushil Jajodia,et al.  Transaction processing in multilevel-secure databases using replicated architecture , 1990, Proceedings. 1990 IEEE Computer Society Symposium on Research in Security and Privacy.

[10]  Bruce G. Lindsay,et al.  Transaction management in the R* distributed database management system , 1986, TODS.

[11]  LouAnna Notargiacomo,et al.  Distributed Concurrency Control with Optional Data Replication , 1991, DBSec.

[12]  Dorothy E. Denning,et al.  Cryptography and Data Security , 1982 .

[13]  Dale Skeen,et al.  Nonblocking commit protocols , 1981, SIGMOD '81.

[14]  Bhavani M. Thuraisingham Multilevel security issues in distributed database management systems II , 1991, Comput. Secur..

[15]  D. Elliott Bell,et al.  Secure Computer System: Unified Exposition and Multics Interpretation , 1976 .