Secure buffering in firm real-time database systems

George, Binto and Haritsa, Jayant R (2000) Secure buffering in firm real-time database systems. In: VLDB Journal, 8 (3). pp. 178-198.

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Abstract

Many real-time database applications arise in electronic financial services, safety-critical installations and military systems where enforcing security is crucial to the success of the enterprise. We investigate here the performance implications, in terms of killed transactions, of guaranteeing multi-level secrecy in a real-time database system supporting applications with firm deadlines. In particular, we focus on the buffer management aspects of this issue. Our main contributions are the following. First, we identify the importance and difficulties of providing secure buffer management in the real-time database environment. Second, we present SABRE, a novel buffer management algorithm that provides covert-channel-free security. SABRE employs a fully dynamic one-copy allocation policy for efficient usage of buffer resources. It also incorporates several optimizations for reducing the overall number of killed transactions and for decreasing the unfairness in the distribution of killed transactions across security levels. Third, using a detailed simulation model, the real-time performance of SABRE is evaluated against unsecure conventional and realtime buffer management policies for a variety of security-classified transaction workloads and system configurations. Our experiments show that SABRE provides security with only a modest drop in real-time performance. Finally, we evaluate SABREs performance when augmented with the GUARD adaptive admission control policy. Our experiments show that this combination provides close to ideal fairness for real-time applications that can tolerate covert-channel bandwidths of up to one bit per second (a limit specified in military standards).

Item Type:	Journal Article
Publication:	VLDB Journal
Publisher:	Springer Verlag
Additional Information:	Copyright for this article belongs to Springer Verlag.
Keywords:	Real-time database;Covert channels;Buffer management;Firm deadlines
Department/Centre:	Division of Interdisciplinary Sciences > Supercomputer Education & Research Centre
Date Deposited:	29 Dec 2004
Last Modified:	19 Sep 2010 04:15
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/1729

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