An integrity lock architecture for supporting distributed authorizations in database federations

Abstract

In many data integration applications, a loosely coupled database federation is the underlying data model. This paper studies two related security issues unique to such a model, namely, how to support fine-grained access control of remote data and how to ensure the integrity of such data while allowing legitimate updates. For the first issue, we adapt the integrity lock architecture in multi-level database systems to a database federation. For the second issue, we propose threestage procedure based on grids of Merkel Hash Trees. Finally, the performance of the proposed architecture and scheme is evaluated through experiments. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.