Performance Evaluation of Secure Concurrency Control Algorithm for Multilevel Secure Distributed Database Systems

Majority of the research in multilevel secure database management systems (MLS/DBMS) focuses primarily on centralized database systems. However, with the demand for higher performance and higher availability, database systems have moved from centralized to distributed architectures, and the research in multilevel secure distributed database management systems (MLS/DDBMS) is gaining more and more prominence. Concurrency control is an integral part of database systems. Secure concurrency control algorithms proposed in literature achieve correctness and security at the cost of declined performance of high security level transactions. These algorithms infringe the fairness in processing transactions at different security levels. Though the performance of different concurrency control algorithms have been explored extensively for centralized multilevel secure database management systems but to the best of author’s knowledge the relative performance of transactions at different security levels using secure concurrency control algorithm for MLS/DDBMS has not been reported yet. To fill this gap, this paper presents a detailed simulation model of a distributed database system and investigates the performance price paid for maintaining security with concurrency control in a distributed database system. The paper investigates the relative performance of transactions at different security levels.