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Model-driven multidimensional modeling of secure data warehouses

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European Journal of Information Systems

Abstract

Data Warehouses (DW), Multidimensional (MD) databases, and On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) applications provide companies with many years of historical information for the decision-making process. Owing to the relevant information managed by these systems, they should provide strong security and confidentiality measures from the early stages of a DW project in the MD modeling and enforce them. In the last years, there have been some proposals to accomplish the MD modeling at the conceptual level. Nevertheless, none of them considers security measures as an important element in their models, and therefore, they do not allow us to specify confidentiality constraints to be enforced by the applications that will use these MD models. In this paper, we present an Access Control and Audit (ACA) model for the conceptual MD modeling. Then, we extend the Unified Modeling Language (UML) with this ACA model, representing the security information (gathered in the ACA model) in the conceptual MD modeling, thereby allowing us to obtain secure MD models. Moreover, we use the OSCL (Object Security Constraint Language) to specify our ACA model constraints, avoiding in this way an arbitrary use of them. Furthermore, we align our approach with the Model-Driven Architecture, the Model-Driven Security and the Model-Driven Data Warehouse, offering a proposal highly compatible with the more recent technologies.

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Notes

  1. It is out of the scope of this paper to provide further detail on all these transformations.

  2. See Abelló et al. (2001) for a summary of the most relevant logical models proposed for MD modeling.

  3. A descriptor attribute will be used as the default label in the data analysis in OLAP tools.

  4. In this paper we will indistinctly refer to subject and user.

  5. In this paper we will indistinctly refer to subject and user

  6. A profile is a set of improvements that extend an existing UML type of diagram for a different use. These improvements are specified by means of the extendibility mechanisms provided by UML (stereotypes, properties and restrictions) in order to be able to adapt it to a new method or model.

  7. All the metaclasses come from the Core Package, a subpackage of the Foundation Package. We based our extension on the UML 1.5 as this is the current accepted standard. To the best of our knowledge, the current UML 2.0 is not the final accepted standard yet.

  8. As can be seen in Figure 6, Level is a new data type inherited from the UML enumeration data type.

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Acknowledgements

This research is part of the following projects: METASIGN (TIN2004-00779), and ESFINGE (TIN2006-15175-C05-05), projects from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science; DIMENSIONS (PBC-05-012-1), DADS (PBC-05-012-2), and MISTICO (PBC06-0082) projects partiality supported by the FEDER and the ‘Consejería de Ciencia y Tecnología de la Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha’, Spain.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. Tecnologías y Sistemas de Información, Univ. Castilla-La Mancha, Ciudad Real, Spain

    Eduardo Fernández-Medina & Mario Piattini

  2. Dept. Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos, Universidad de Alicante, Alicante, Spain

    Juan Trujillo

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  1. Eduardo Fernández-Medina
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  2. Juan Trujillo
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  3. Mario Piattini
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Correspondence to Eduardo Fernández-Medina.

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Acronyms

ACA: Access Control and Audit

AR: Audit Rule

AUR: Authorization Rule

CWM: Common Warehouse Metamodel

DAG: Directed Acyclic Graph

DBMS: Database Management System

DW: Data Warehouse

EBNF: Extended Backus Naur Form

ETL: Extraction–Transformation–Loading

MAC: Mandatory Access Control

MD: Multidimensional

MDA: Model-Driven Architecture

MDDW: Model-Driven Data Warehouse

MDS: Model-Driven Security

MOF: Meta Object Facility

OCL: Object Constraint Language

OID: Object Identifier

OLAP: On-Line Analytical Processing

OLS: Oracle Label Security

OMG: Object Management Group

OSCL: Object Security Constraint Language

PIM: Platform Independent Model

PSM: Platform Specific Model

RBAC: Role Based Access Control

SIAR: Security Information Assignment Rule

UML: Unified Modeling Language

XMI: eXtensible Markup Interchange

XML: eXtensible Markup Language

Abbreviations used in the ACA grammar

ATT: Attribute

CID: Compartment Identification

CL: Class

COND: Condition

ID: User Identification

INVCLASSES: Involved Classes

LOGINFO: Log Information

RID: Role Identification

SC: Security Compartments

SECINF: Security Information

SL: Security Level

SL: Security Levels

SR: Security Roles

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Fernández-Medina, E., Trujillo, J. & Piattini, M. Model-driven multidimensional modeling of secure data warehouses. Eur J Inf Syst 16, 374–389 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.ejis.3000687

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