Strong and Provably Secure Database Access Control

TL;DR

This paper introduces a provably secure database access control mechanism that addresses limitations of existing SQL controls by providing strong security guarantees against advanced attack vectors.

Contribution

It develops a formal security framework and a new access control mechanism that is proven to be secure against realistic attacker models in modern databases.

Findings

Prevents privilege escalation and data leakage attacks.

Provides formal security proofs for the proposed mechanism.

Addresses gaps in theoretical foundations of database security.

Abstract

Existing SQL access control mechanisms are extremely limited. Attackers can leak information and escalate their privileges using advanced database features such as views, triggers, and integrity constraints. This is not merely a problem of vendors lagging behind the state-of-the-art. The theoretical foundations for database security lack adequate security definitions and a realistic attacker model, both of which are needed to evaluate the security of modern databases. We address these issues and present a provably secure access control mechanism that prevents attacks that defeat popular SQL database systems.