A Java Data Security Framework (JDSF) and its Case Studies

TL;DR

The paper introduces a Java Data Security Framework (JDSF) with sub-frameworks for confidentiality, integrity, and authentication, designed to support secure data storage and verification in Java applications, exemplified through MARF and HSQLDB case studies.

Contribution

It presents a novel extensible Java security framework integrating diverse security algorithms into a unified API, tailored for database and data security applications.

Findings

Framework supports plug-in security algorithms

Enables verification of security aspects in Java applications

Simplifies integration of security features into databases

Abstract

We present the design of something we call Confidentiality, Integrity and Authentication Sub-Frameworks, which are a part of a more general Java Data Security Framework (JDSF) designed to support various aspects related to data security (confidentiality, origin authentication, integrity, and SQL randomization). The JDSF was originally designed in 2007 for use in the two use-cases, MARF and HSQLDB, to allow a plug-in-like implementation of and verification of various security aspects and their generalization. The JDSF project explores secure data storage related issues from the point of view of data security in the two projects. A variety of common security aspects and tasks were considered in order to extract a spectrum of possible parameters these aspects require for the design an extensible frameworked API and its implementation. A particular challenge being tackled is an aggregation of diverse approaches and algorithms into a common set of Java APIs to cover all or at least most common aspects, and, at the same time keeping the framework as simple as possible. As a part of the framework, we provide the mentioned sub-frameworks' APIs to allow for the common algorithm implementations of the confidentiality, integrity, and authentication aspects for MARF's and HSQLDB's database(s). At the same time we perform a detailed overview of the related work and literature on data and database security that we considered as a possible input to design the JDSF.