Secure Data Sharing

This proposal investigates the feasibility of a secure transaction manager (STM) for defining and implementing policies that govern when and how DBMS transactions can be executed. Database management systems and transaction processing systems use the concept of a transaction to organize and control the manner in which application programs can access network resources, including databases and file systems. Transactions allow application programs to combine operations on multiple different network resources into a single atomic operation. The STM acts as a connection and filter between the client application and various DBMS servers on the network. It provides the ability to run atomic transactions that access multiple databases on different networks and extends the security and integrity controls provided by commercial DMSs by allowing additional policies to be defined and enforced on these transactions. for example, integrity policies could be defined that prevent data from being accessed or modified except via certain predefined transactions, In a commercial environment, this allows a wide variety of organization specific policies to be implemented. In a Department of Defense environment, this allows special transactions to be identified that have the ability to execute at several levels and that can be verified to not leak classified information. Such transactions provide a secure approach to sharing and updating information between single-level databases on networks at different levels.