Multilevel security issues in distributed database management systems II

The rapid growth of the networking and information-processing industries has led to the development of distributed database management system prototypes and commercial distributed database management systems. In such a system, the database is stored in several computers which are interconnected by some communication media. The aim of a distributed database management system (DDBMS) is to process and communicate data in an efficient and cost-effective manner. It has been recognized that such distributed systems are vital for the efficient processing required in military as well as commercial applications. For many of these applications it is especially important that the DDBMS should provide multilevel security. For example, the DDBMS should allow users who are cleared at different security levels access to the database consisting of data at a variety of sensitivity levels without compromising security. In this paper we discuss multilevel security issues for a DDBMS. We first describe a system architecture, security policy, and data/metadata distribution issues for a multilevel secure DDBMS (MLSJDDBMS). Next we describe issues on query processing and transaction management based on the system architecture considered.