A Framework for Efficient Storage Security in RDBMS

Abstract

With the widespread use of e-business coupled with the public’s awareness of data privacy issues and recent database security related legislations, incorporating security features into modern database products has become an increasingly important topic. Several database vendors already offer integrated solutions that provide data privacy within existing products. However, treating security and privacy issues as an afterthought often results in inefficient implementations. Some notable RDBMS storage models (such as the N-ary Storage Model) suffer from this problem. In this work, we analyze issues in storage security and discuss a number of trade-offs between security and efficiency. We then propose a new secure storage model and a key management architecture which enable efficient cryptographic operations while maintaining a very high level of security. We also assess the performance of our proposed model by experimenting with a prototype implementation based on the well-known TPC-H data set.