Object Oriented Database with Authorization Policies

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Bai, Yun | Varadharajan, Vijay

Affiliations: School of Computing and Information Technology, University of Western Sydney, Locked Bag 1797, Penrith South DC 1797, Australia | Department of Computing, Macquarie University, North Ryde, NSW 2109, Australia

Abstract: Authorization specification in object oriented databases is being increasingly investigated recently by many researchers [4,5,7,9,10]. However, most of the work todate suffers from a lack of formal logic semantics to characterize different types of inheritance properties of authorization policies among complex data objects. This paper is to address this issue from a formal logic point of view. In particular, we propose a logic language that has a clear and declarative semantics to specify the structural features of object oriented databases and authorizations associated with complex data objects in databases. Our formalization characterizes the model-theoretic semantics of object oriented databases and authorizations associated with them. A direct advantage of this approach is that we can formally specify and reason about authorizations on data objects without loosing inheritance and abstraction features of object oriented databases.

Keywords: Formal specification, security, database

Journal: Fundamenta Informaticae, vol. 53, no. 3-4, pp. 229-250, 2002