Confidentiality vs Integrity in Secure Databases

Abstract

Abstract:The problem of enforcing confidentiality in the presence of integrity constraints in secure and, in particular, in multi level databases is still open. To enforce confidentiality the majority of previous works either advocates a violation of integrity or proposes pragmatically its preservation or restoration.In this work we argue that there can never be a trade-off between these two properties for integrity is a fundamental quality of every database, ie also a secure one. Confidentiality always implies a kind of distortion of the open database. We introduce a formally sound method for its enforcement which relies on aliases, ie, additional tuples the only purpose of which is the preservation of integrity of both the open database and each distortion of it.