Enhancing Database Access Control with XACML Policy

XACML is apparently the most convenient way to express attribute-based access control policies. Though XACML has been used in several access control areas, processing XACML policies for attribute-based database access control still has not been studied in depth. In this work we compile XACML policies, and utilize the underlying database access mechanisms such as ACLs to protect sensitive data. We use the attribute information residing in the database itself to define high level XACML policies and transform this policy to low level database access policies for access decisions on another part of the database. We implement and evaluate our idea over a synthetic database and come up with efficient policy compilation and verification time.