A Secure Kernelized Architecture for Multiple Object-Oriented Databases

We present a secure kernelized architecture for multilevel object-oriented database management systems. Our architecture is based on the notion of a message lter proposed by Jajodia and Kogan. It builds upon the typical architecture of current object-oriented database management systems. Since the operations mediated by the message lter are arbitrarily complex operations (as opposed to primitive reads and writes), a secure message lter requires careful attention to potential timing covert channels. Although the overall computation is logically a sequential one, to be secure we must actually execute pieces of the computation concurrently. This raises a synchronization problem for which we give a secure multiversion protocol. The fundamental problem solved in this paper is how to securely and correctly \write up" in terms of abstract operations.