Analysis of Access Control Mechanisms for Spatial Database

The development and application of GIS ultimately creates the demand for spatial information security, and access control is our primary concern. Spatial information is mostly stored and managed by database technologies, and SDE/RDBMS and ORDBMS are the most popular two. Correspondingly, there are two possible solutions for restricting access to spatial information in database: the SDE-based access control mechanism and the view-based access control mechanism. In the SDE-based mechanism, we have to modify the source code of SDE and alter the schemas of spatial tables to realize access control functionalities. In the view-based mechanism, we use the view techniques to define various views to meet different security requirements, and then authorizing privileges to views. The basic components of an access control system mainly contain user authentication, authorization rule repository, PEP, PDP, and PIP, which are distributed and implemented differently in the two mechanisms. As the view-based mechanism is much cheaper and flexible, it is the better choice for individual users or small companies to add access control functionality in their spatial applications. * [email protected]; phone 86-10-62769285-803;