Analysis of Challenges in the Design and Development of Multi-Level Secure Databases

Database security mainly deal with the secrecy, integrity and availability of data stored in a database. The common threats to the databases involve Privilege Abuse, Weak Authentication, Weak Audit Trails and Operating System Vulnerabilities. To make the security least compromised; all users are required to follow the rules set up by Database Administrator. These rules are said to be Mandatory Access Control (MAC) based security policies. The Multi-Level secure Databases are implemented by considering these policies. A multilevel secure database provides internal security to the database. The data stored in MLS databases is classified in several levels of sensitivity. A user is allowed to access the data that matches its classification level. The user classification is referred to clearance levels. Therefore, users with different clearance levels access different versions of data. Due to the various issues like Covert channel, Polyinstantiation and lack of security while transmitting the data in distributed databases, it becomes difficult to design and develop the secure databases. Various challenges in front of researchers are Query processing in distributed Multilevel Secure Databases, Deadlock Detection and Resolution and Concurrency control. In this paper we present all these issues and also the techniques which resolve the issues. Keywords— Multilevel security, Query processing, deadlock detection and recovery, transaction, wait-for-graph, concurrency control