Advanced Database System

Chapter Six
Database Security and Authorization

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 Outline
 Introduction to Database Security Issues
 Database Security and DBA
 Discretionary Access Control Based on Granting and
Revoking Privileges
 Mandatory Access Control
 Role-Based Access Control for Multilevel Security
 Statistical Database Security
 Data encryption

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Introduction to Database Security Issues
 Threats to databases
 Loss of integrity

 Loss of availability

 Loss of confidentiality

 To protect databases against these types of threats, four kinds

of countermeasures can be implemented:
 Access control,

 Inference control,

 Flow control and

 Encryption

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Introduction to Access control
 A DBMS typically includes a database security and
authorization subsystem that is responsible for ensuring the
security portions of a database against unauthorized access.
 The security mechanism of a DBMS must include provisions
for restricting access to the database as a whole.
 This function is called access control and is handled by
creating user accounts and passwords to control login
process by the DBMS.

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Database Security and the DBA
 The database administrator (DBA) is the central authority for
managing a database system.
 The DBA’s responsibilities include

Granting privileges to users who need to use the system

Classifying users and data in accordance with the policy
of the organization
 The DBA is responsible for the overall security of the database
system.

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Database Security and the DBA (cont…)
 The DBA has a DBA account in the DBMS
 Sometimes these are called a system or superuser account
 These accounts provide powerful capabilities such as:

1.Account creation

2.Privilege granting

3.Privilege revocation

4.Security level assignment

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 Access Protection, User Accounts, and
Database Audits
 Whenever a person or group of persons need to access a
database system, the individual or group must first apply for a
user account.
 The DBA will then create a new account id and password
for the user if he/she has a legitimate need to access the
database.
 The user must log in to the DBMS by entering account id and
password whenever database access is needed

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 Access Protection, User Accounts, and
Database Audits (cont…)
 The database system must also keep track of all operations on
the database that are applied by a certain user throughout each
login session.
 To keep a record of all updates applied to the database and of
the particular user who applied each update, we can modify
system log, which includes an entry for each operation
applied to the database that may be required for recovery
from a transaction failure or system crash.

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Access Protection, User Accounts, and
Database Audits (cont…)
 If any tampering with the database is suspected, a database
audit is performed.
 A database audit consists of reviewing the log to examine
all accesses and operations applied to the database during
a certain time period.
 A database log that is used mainly for security purposes is
called an audit trail.

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Database access control
 Database access control is a method of allowing access to
company’s sensitive data only to those people (database
users) who are allowed to access such data and to restrict
access to unauthorized persons. It includes two main
components: authentication and authorization.
 Authentication is a method of verifying the identity of a
person who is accessing your database. Note that
authentication isn’t enough to protect data. An additional
layer of security is required, authorization, which
determines whether a user should be allowed to access the
data or make the transaction he’s attempting. Without
authentication and authorization, there is no data security.

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 Types of Access Control
 Discretionary(things are not fixed by rules but are decided on by
people in authority) Access Control (DAC)
 DAC type of security access control that grants or restricts object access
via an access policy determined by an object's owner group and/or
subjects. DACs are discretionary because the subject (owner) can transfer
authenticated objects or information access to other users.
 Mandatory Access Control (MAC) :MAC was developed using a
nondiscretionary model, in which people are granted access based on an
information clearance. MAC is a policy in which access rights are
assigned based on central authority regulations.
 Role Based Access Control (RBAC): RBAC grants access based on a
user’s role and implements key security principles such as “least
privilege” and “separation of privilege.” Thus, someone attempting to
access information can only access data necessary for their role.

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Discretionary Access Control
 This is the typical method of enforcing access control in a
database based on the granting and revoking privileges.

2.1 Types of Discretionary Privileges

 The account level:

At this level, the DBA specifies the particular privileges
that each account holds independently of the relations in the
database.
 The relation level (or table level):
 At this level, the DBA can control the privilege to access each
individual relation or view in the database.

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 Discretionary Privileges (cont…)
 The Privileges at the account level apply to the capabilities provided to the
account itself and can include.

CREATE TABLE privilege, to create a base relation;

The CREATE VIEW privilege;

The ALTER privilege, to apply schema changes such as adding or
removing attributes from relations;

The DROP privilege, to delete relations or views;

The MODIFY privilege, to insert, delete, or update tuples;

and the SELECT privilege, to retrieve information from the database by
using a SELECT query.

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 Types of Discretionary Privileges (cont…)
 The second level of privileges applies to the relation level.
 This includes privileges on base relations and virtual (view) relations.
 The granting and revoking of privileges generally follow an authorization
model for discretionary privileges known as the access matrix model
where
 The rows of a matrix M represents subjects (users, accounts, programs)
 The columns represent objects (relations, records, columns, views,
operations).
 Each position M(i,j) in the matrix represents the types of privileges
(read, write, update) that subject i holds on object j.

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 Types of Discretionary Privileges (cont..)
 To control the granting and revoking of relation privileges, each relation
R in a database is assigned an owner account, which is typically the
account that was used when the relation was created in the first place.
 The owner of a relation is given all privileges on that relation.
 The owner account holder can pass privileges on any of the owned
relation to other users by granting privileges to their accounts.

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Types of Discretionary Privileges (cont…)
 In SQL, the following types of privileges can be granted on each individual
relation R:
 SELECT (retrieval or read) privilege on R:

Gives a retrieval privilege to the account

This gives the account holder the privilege to use the SELECT
statement to retrieve tuples from R.
 MODIFY privileges on R:

This gives the account the capability to modify tuples of R.

This privilege is further divided into UPDATE, DELETE, and
INSERT privileges to apply the corresponding SQL command to R.

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 Granting and Revoking Privileges
 In some cases, it is desirable to grant a privilege to a user
temporarily. For example,
 The owner of a relation may want to grant the SELECT
privilege to a user for a specific task and then revoke that
privilege once the task is completed
 Hence, a mechanism for revoking privileges is needed.
 In SQL, a REVOKE command is included for the purpose
of canceling privileges.

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 Propagation of Privileges using the GRANT
OPTION
 Whenever the owner A of a relation R grants a privilege on R to
another account B, privilege can be given to B with or without the
GRANT OPTION.
 If the GRANT OPTION is given, this means that B can also
grant that privilege on R to other accounts.
 Suppose that B is given the GRANT OPTION by A and that

B then grants the privilege on R to a third account C, also with

GRANT OPTION.
 In this way, privileges on R can propagate to other accounts

without the knowledge of the owner of R.

 If the owner account A now revokes the privilege granted to B,

all the privileges that B propagated based on that privilege

should automatically be revoked by the system.

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 An Example
 Suppose that the DBA creates four accounts
 A1, A2, A3, A4

 And wants only A1 to be able to create base relations. Then, the

DBA must issue the following GRANT command in SQL
GRANT CREATE TABLE TO A1;

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An Example (cont…)
 User account A1 can create tables.
 Suppose that A1 creates the two base relations EMPLOYEE and
DEPARTMENT

A1 is then owner of these two relations and hence all the relation privileges
on each of them.
 Suppose that A1 wants to grant A2 the privilege to insert and delete tuples in
both of these relations, but A1 does not want A2 to be able to propagate these
privileges to additional accounts:

GRANT INSERT, DELETE ON

EMPLOYEE, DEPARTMENT TO A2;

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An Example (cont…)
 Suppose that A1 wants to allow A3 to retrieve information from either of the
two tables and also to be able to propagate the SELECT privilege to other
accounts.
 A1 can issue the command:

GRANT SELECT ON EMPLOYEE, DEPARTMENT

TO A3 WITH GRANT OPTION;

 A3 can grant the SELECT privilege on the EMPLOYEE relation to A4 by
issuing:

GRANT SELECT ON EMPLOYEE TO A4;


Notice that A4 can’t propagate the SELECT privilege because GRANT
OPTION was not given to A4

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An Example (cont…)

 Suppose that A1 decides to revoke the SELECT privilege

on the EMPLOYEE relation from A3; A1 can issue:
REVOKE SELECT ON EMPLOYEE FROM A3;
 The DBMS must now automatically revoke the SELECT
privilege on EMPLOYEE from A4, too, because A3
granted that privilege to A4 so that A3 does not have the
privilege any more.

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 Example (cont…)
 Suppose that A1 wants to give back to A3 a limited capability to SELECT
from the EMPLOYEE relation and wants to allow A3 to be able to
propagate the privilege.
 The limitation is to retrieve only the NAME, BDATE, and ADDRESS

attributes and only for the tuples with DNO=5.

 A1 then create the view:
CREATE VIEW A3EMPLOYEE AS
SELECT NAME, BDATE, ADDRESS
FROM EMPLOYEE
WHERE DNO = 5;
 After the view is created, A1 can grant SELECT on the view
A3EMPLOYEE to A3 as follows:
GRANT SELECT ON A3EMPLOYEE TO A3
WITH GRANT OPTION;
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An Example (cont…)
 Finally, suppose that A1 wants to allow A4 to update only the
SALARY attribute of EMPLOYEE;
 A1 can issue:

GRANT UPDATE ON EMPLOYEE (SALARY) TO A4;

 The UPDATE or INSERT privilege can specify particular
attributes that may be updated or inserted in a relation

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Mandatory Access Control Multilevel Security

 The discretionary access control techniques of granting and revoking

privileges on relations has been the main security mechanism for
relational database systems. A user either has or does not have a certain
privilege.
 In many applications, additional security policy is needed that
classifies data and users based on security classes.
 This approach as mandatory access control, would typically be
combined with the discretionary access control mechanisms.

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Mandatory Access Control Multilevel Security (cont…)

 Typical security classes are top secret (TS), secret (S),

confidential (C), and unclassified (U), where TS is the highest
level and U the lowest: TS ≥ S ≥ C ≥ U
 The commonly used model for multilevel security, classifies each
subject (user, account, program) and object (relation, tuple,
column, view, operation) into one of the security classifications,
TS, S, C, or U:

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Comparing Discretionary Access Control and
Mandatory Access Control
 Discretionary Access Control (DAC) policies are characterized
by a high degree of flexibility, which makes them suitable for a
large variety of application domains.
 The main drawback of DAC models is their vulnerability to
malicious attacks, such as Trojan horses embedded in application
programs.

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Comparing Discretionary Access Control and
Mandatory Access Control (cont…)
 By contrast, mandatory policies ensure a high degree of
protection in a way, they prevent any illegal flow of
information.
 Mandatory policies have the drawback of being too rigid and
they are only applicable in limited environments.
 In many practical situations, discretionary policies are preferred
because they offer a better trade-off between security and
applicability.

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Role-Based Access Control
 Role-based access control (RBAC) has emerged rapidly in the
1990s as a proven technology for managing and enforcing
security in large-scale enterprise wide systems.
 Its basic notion is that permissions are associated with roles, and
users are assigned to appropriate roles.
 Roles can be created using the CREATE ROLE commands.
 The GRANT and REVOKE commands discussed under

DAC can then be used to assign and revoke privileges from

roles

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 Role-Based Access Control (cont…)
 RBAC appears to be a viable alternative to discretionary and
mandatory access controls; it ensures that only authorized users
are given access to certain data or resources.
 Many DBMSs have allowed the concept of roles, where
privileges can be assigned to roles.
 Role hierarchy in RBAC is a natural way of organizing roles to
reflect the organization’s lines of authority and responsibility.

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Role-Based Access Control (cont…)
 Using RBAC model is highly desirable goal for addressing the
key security requirements of Web-based applications.
 In contrast, discretionary access control (DAC) and mandatory
access control (MAC) models lack capabilities needed to
support the security requirements emerging enterprises and
Web-based applications.

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Flow Control
 Another security is that of flow control, which prevents
information from flowing in such a way that it reaches
unauthorized users.
 Channels that are pathways for information to flow implicitly
in ways that violate the security policy of an organization are
called covert channels.

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 Introduction to Statistical Database Security
 Statistical databases are used mainly to produce statistics
on various populations.
 The database may contain confidential data on individuals,
which should be protected from user access.
 Users are permitted to retrieve statistical information on
the populations, such as averages, sums, counts,
maximums, minimums, and standard deviations.
 A population is a set of tuples of a relation (table) that
satisfy some selection condition.
 Statistical queries involve applying statistical functions to
a population of tuples.

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Statistical database Security (cont…)
 For example, we may want to retrieve the number of individuals in a
population or the average income in the population.

However, statistical users are not allowed to retrieve individual data,
such as the income of a specific person.
 Statistical database security techniques must prohibit the retrieval of
individual data.
 This can be achieved by prohibiting queries that retrieve attribute values
and by allowing only queries that involve statistical aggregate functions
such as COUNT, SUM, MIN, MAX, AVERAGE, and STANDARD
DEVIATION.

Such queries are sometimes called statistical queries.

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Inference control
 The security problem associated with databases is that of
controlling the access to a statistical database, which is
used to provide statistical information or summaries of
values based on various criteria.
 Statistical database security problem should be handled
using inference control measures.

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Data encryption
 Another security issue is data encryption, which is used to protect
sensitive data (such as credit card numbers and user
accounts(username , password) that is being transmitted via some
type of communication network.
 Using encryption method, the data is encoded using some
encoding algorithm.
 Unauthorized user who access encoded data will have difficulty
deciphering it, but authorized users are given decoding or
decrypting algorithms (or keys) to decipher data

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Encryption and Public Key Infrastructures
 Encryption is a means of maintaining secure data in an
insecure environment.
 Encryption consists of applying an encryption algorithm
to data using some pre specified encryption key.
 The resulting data has to be decrypted using a decryption
key to recover the original data.

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Data Encryption components
 Plaintext: This is the data or readable message that is fed
into the algorithm as input.
 Encryption algorithm: The encryption algorithm performs
various transformations on the plaintext.
 Public and private keys: These are pair of keys that have
been selected so that if one is used for encryption, the other
is used for decryption.

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Data Encryption components (cont…)
 Ciphertext:

This is the scrambled message produced as output. It
depends on the plaintext and the key.
 Decryption algorithm:

This algorithm accepts the ciphertext and the matching
key and produces the original plaintext.

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Additionally Read about
 Digital signature
 Database data encryption algorithms

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 Thank you……………….

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