Section 6.11. Where the Field Is Headed


6.11. Where the Field Is Headed

Database security has been receiving renewed interest, in part because of privacy concerns related to information gathering to counter terrorism.

Privacy concerns (for more discussion of which see Chapter 10) will lead to more investigation of ways to protect privacy while allowing the power of databases to track targeted individuals. Because most targets become such only when their profile emerges from a database, many of these controls will have to be procedural, to ensure that sensitive information is not misused, rather than technical, to restrict access to potentially sensitive information. Controls are especially needed for the field of data mining, the practice of pulling closely focused results from large and perhaps only partially structured data. Agrawal and Srikant [AGR00] present an approach that could address both needs.

A second trend in database technology that should be of interest is decentralization. Segmentation, replication, and mirroring of databases are all methods that can improve performance, usability, and reliability in databases. Yet in the decentralization, data are also subject to inadvertent and nonmalicious integrity failures, as well as malicious ones. The well-studied topic of Byzantine failures has been applied to cooperating processes [LAM82]. (The problem, simply stated, is how to protect the correctness of a compound system against one or more compromised subsystems.) A similar approach will need to be applied to distributed databases. Work in this area is already underway at Xerox PARC [TER98] and other places.




Security in Computing
Security in Computing, 4th Edition
ISBN: 0132390779
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 171

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