Chapter 8: Database

Security

Adama Science and Technology University

School of Electrical Engineering and Computing
Department of CSE
CSEg 2208: Database Systems
(2023)
 Outline

 Introduction to Database Security

Discretionary Access Control
Mandatory Access Control
 Role-Based Access Control
Statistical Database Security

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 Introduction to Database
Security
 In today's society, Some information is extremely important as to have to be
protected. For example, disclosure or modification of military information could
cause danger to national security. A good database security management system
has to handle the possible database threats.
 Threat may be any situation or event, whether intentional or accidental, that may
adversely affect a system and consequently the organization
 Threats to databases : It may results in degradation of some/all security
goals like;
 Loss of Integrity
 Only authorized users should be allowed to modify data.
 For example, students may be allowed to see their grades, but not
allowed to modify them.

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 Cont…

 Loss ofAvailability-if DB is not available for those users/ to which they

have a legal right to uses the data
• Authorized users should not be denied access.
• For example, an instructor who wishes to change a grade should be
allowed to do so.
 Loss of Confidentiality
 Information should not be disclosed to unauthorized users.
 For example, a student should not be allowed to examine other
students' grades.

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 Cont…

Authentication
• All users of the database will have different access levels and permission
for different data objects, and authentication is the process of checking
whether the user is the one with the privilege for the access level.
• Thus the system will check whether the user with a specific username
and password is trying to use the resource
Authorization/Privilege
• Authorization refers to the process that determines the mode in which a
particular (previously authenticated) client is allowed to access a specific
resource controlled by a server.

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 Cont…

Any database access request will have the following three

major components:
1.Requested Operation: what kind of operation is requested by
a specific query?
2. Requested Object: on which resource or data of the database
is the operation sought to be applied?
3. Requesting User: who is the user requesting the operation on
the specified object?

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 Forms of user authorization

There are different forms of user authorization on the resource of the

database. These includes :
1. Read Authorization: the user with this privilege is allowed only to read
the content of the data object.
2. Insert Authorization: the user with this privilege is allowed only to
insert new records or items to the data object.
3. Update Authorization: users with this privilege are allowed to modify
content of attributes but are not authorized to delete the records.
4. Delete Authorization: users with this privilege are only allowed to
delete a record and not anything else.

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 Cont…

 Note: Different users, depending on the power of the user, can have
one or the combination of the above forms of authorization on
different data objects.

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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
 Account creation
 granting privileges to users who need to use the system
 Privilege revocation
 classifying users and data in accordance with the policy of the
organization

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 Access Protection, User
Accounts, and Databases
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 believes there is 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.
 The database system must also keep track of all operations on the database
that are applied by a certain user throughout each login session

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 Cont…

 If any tampering with the database is assumed, 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
sometimes called an audit trail.
 To protect databases against the possible threats two kinds of
countermeasures can be implemented: Access control ,and
Encryption
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 Access Control (AC)

 Discretionary Access Control (DAC)

 The typical method of enforcing discretionary access control in a database system is based on the granting and revoking privileges.
 The granting and revoking of privileges 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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 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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 Privileges Using Views

The mechanism of views is an important discretionary

authorization mechanism in its own right. For example,
If the owner A of a relation R wants another account B to
be able to retrieve only some fields of R, then A can
create a view V of R that includes only those attributes
and then grant SELECT on V to B.

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 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
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 Cont…

Example 1:
 Suppose that the DBA creates four accounts:A1, A2, A3, A4 and wants only A1
to be able to create relations. Then the DBA must issue the following GRANT
command in SQL: GRANT CREATETAB TO A1;
Example 2
 Suppose that A1 creates the two base relations EMPLOYEE and
DEPARTMENT
A1 is then owner of these two relations and hence A1 has all the relation privileges
on each of them.
 Suppose that A1 wants to grant A2 the privilege to insert and delete rows 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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 Cont…

Example 3
 Suppose that A1 wants to allow A3 to retrieve information from
either of the table (Department or Employee) 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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 Cont…

Example 4
 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 and
A3 does not have the privilege any more.
Example 5
– 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;
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 Cont…

 Example 6:
 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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 Mandatory Access Control

 DAC techniques is an all-or-nothing method:

 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.
 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, known as the Bell-
LaPadula model, classifies each subject (user, account, program) and object
(relation, tuple, column, view, operation) into one of the security
classifications, T, S, C, or U:
 Clearance (classification) of a subject S as class(S) and to the
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 Cont…

 Two restrictions are enforced on data access based on the subject/object

classifications:
 A subject S is not allowed read access to an object O unless class(S) ≥ class(O).
 A subject S is not allowed to write an object O unless class(S) ≤ class(O).
 To incorporate multilevel security notions into the relational database model, it is
common to consider attribute values and rows as data objects.
 Hence, each attribute A is associated with a classification attribute C in the schema
 In addition, in some models, a tuple classification attribute TC is added to the relation
attributes to provide a classification for each tuple as a whole.
 Hence, a multilevel relation schema R with n attributes would be represented as
 R(A1,C1,A2,C2, …, An,Cn,TC)
 where each Ci represents the classification attribute associated with attribute Ai.

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 Cont…

 The value of the TC attribute in each tuple t – which is the highest of all attribute
classification values within t – provides a general classification for the tuple itself
 Whereas, each Ci provides a finer security classification for each attribute value within
the tuple.
 A multilevel relation will appear to contain different data to subjects (users) with different
clearance levels.
 In some cases, it is possible to store a single tuple in the relation at a higher classification
level and produce the corresponding tuples at a lower-level classification through a
process known as filtering.
 In other cases, it is necessary to store two or more tuples at different classification levels
with the same value for the apparent key.
 This leads to the concept of polyinstantiation where several tuples can have the same
apparent key value but have different attribute values for users at different classification
levels.
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 Cont…

Example: consider select * from Employee

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 Cont…

• (a) The original employee table,

• (b) After filtering employee table for classification C users,
• (c) After filtering employee table for classification U users
• (d) Polyinstantation of the smith row for C users who want to
modify some value

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 Cont…

 A user with a security clearance S would see the same relation shown above (a)
since all row classification are less than or equal to S as shown in (a).
 However a user with security clearance C would not allowed to see values for
salary of Brown and jobperformance of Smith, since they have higher
classification as shown in (b)
 For a user with security clearance U , filtering introduces null values for
attributes values whose security classification is higher than the user’s security
clearance as shown in (c)
 A user with security clearance C may request for update on the values of job
performance of smith to ‘Excellent’ and the view will allow him to do
so .However the user shouldn't be allowed to overwrite the existing value at the
higher classification level.
 Solution: to create ployinstantation for smith row at the lower classification
level C as shown in (d)
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 Comparing DAC and MAC

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 weakness to
malicious attacks, such as Trojan horses embedded in
application programs.
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

 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 and DESTROY ROLE
commands.
 The GRANT and REVOKE commands discussed under DAC can then
be used to assign and revoke privileges from roles.
 RBAC appears to be a feasible 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:\My DB File\Role.ppt

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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 rows of a relation (table) that satisfy some selection
condition.
 Statistical queries involve applying statistical functions to a population of rows.
 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.

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 Cont…

Statistical database security techniques must disallow the retrieval of individual

data.
This can be achieved by elimination of queries that retrieve attribute values and
by allowing only queries that involve statistical aggregate functions such as,
SUM, MIN, MAX,
Such queries are sometimes called statistical queries.
It is DBMS’s responsibility to ensure confidentiality of information about
individuals, while still providing useful statistical summaries of data about those
individuals to users. Provision of privacy protection of users in a statistical
database is paramount.
In some cases it is possible to infer the values of individual rows from a
sequence statistical queries.
This is particularly true when the conditions result in a population
consisting of a small number of rows.
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 Cont…

Example:
Solution:
Not to allow query if the number of rows fall below a certain threshold
To forbid sequences of queries that refer to repeatedly to the same population of
rows

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 Encryption

Authorization may not be sufficient to protect data in database systems, especially when
there is a situation where data should be moved from one location to the other using
network facilities.
Encryption is used to protect information stored at a particular site or transmitted
between sites from being accessed by unauthorized users.
Encryption is the encoding of the data by a special algorithm that renders the data
unreadable by any program without the decryption key.
It is not possible for encrypted data to be read unless the reader knows how to
decipher/decrypt the encrypted data.
If a database system holds particularly sensitive data, it may be believed necessary
to encode it as a insurance against possible external threats or attempts to access it
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 Cont…

 The DBMS can access data after decoding it, although there is a degradation in performance because
of the time taken to decode it
 Encryption also protects data transmitted over communication lines
 To transmit data securely over insecure networks requires the use of a Cryptosystem, which includes:
1. An encryption key to encrypt the data (plaintext)
2. An encryption algorithm that, with the encryption key, transforms the plaintext into ciphertext
3. A decryption key to decrypt the ciphertext
4. A decryption algorithm that, with the decryption key, transforms the ciphertext back into plaintext
Data encryption standard is an approach which does both a substitution of characters and a
rearrangement of their order based on an encryption key.

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 Cont…

 Types of Cryptosystems
 Cryptosystems can be categorized into two:
1. Symmetric encryption – uses the same key for both encryption
and decryption and relies on safe communication lines for
exchanging the key.
2. Asymmetric encryption – uses different keys for encryption and
decryption
 Generally, symmetric algorithms are much faster to execute on a
computer than those that are asymmetric. In the contrary,
asymmetric algorithms are more secure than symmetric algorithms.

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 Digital Signatures
A digital signature is an example of using encryption techniques to provide
authentication services in e-commerce applications.
A digital signature is a means of associating a mark unique to an individual with
a body of text.
The mark should be unforgettable, meaning that others should be able to
check that the signature does come from the originator.
Public key techniques are the means creating digital signatures.
By combining digital signature with public key, it is possible to secure
encryption with verification of digital signature
Example : Abebe is a sender and Kebede is the receiver
Abebe sign his message with his private key
Abebe encrypt the signed message with Kebed’s Public key and send it
to Kebede
Kebede decrypts the message with his private key
Kebede verifies with Abebe’s public key and recovers the message.
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 Cont…

 Two 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 privileges at this level apply to the capabilities provided
to the account itself and can include the CREATE TABLE ,
CREATE VIEW, DROP, MODIFY and the SELECT
privilege
 The 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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 Question & Answer

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 Thanks !!!

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