Alternative correctness criteria for concurrent execution of transactions in multilevel secure databases

Abstract

This paper investigates issues related to transaction concurrency control in multilevel secure databases. It demonstrates how the conflicts between the correctness requirements and the secrecy requirements can be reconciled by proposing two different solutions. This paper, first, explores the correctness criteria that are weaker than one-copy serializability. Each of these weaker criteria, though not as strict as one-copy serializability, is required to preserve database consistency in some meaningful way, and moreover, its implementation does not require the scheduler to be trusted. It proposes three different, increasingly stricter notions of serializability - level-wise serializability, one-item read serializability and pair-wise serializability - that can serve as substitutes for one-copy serializability. This paper, then, investigates secure concurrency control protocols that generate one-copy serializable histories and presents a multiversion timestamping protocol that has several very desirable properties: It is secure, produces multiversion histories that are equivalent to serial one-copy histories in which transactions are placed in a timestamp order, eliminates starvation, and can be implemented using single-level untrusted schedulers. ©1996 IEEE.