Spurred by financial scandals and privacy concerns, governments worldwide have moved to ensure confidence in digital records by regulating their retention and deletion. The goal of this project is to develop and explore a DBMS architecture that supports a spectrum of approaches to regulatory compliance, thereby extending the level of protection afforded by conventional file-based compliance storage servers to the vast amounts of structured data residing in databases. The key challenge of this work is to provide compliance assurances for the DBMS, even against insiders with superuser powers, while balancing the need for trustworthiness against the conflicting requirements for scalable performance guarantees and low cost. The resulting architecture provides tunable tradeoffs between security and performance, through a spectrum of techniques ranging from tamper detection to tamper prevention for data, indexes, logs, and metadata; tunable vulnerability windows; tunable granularities of protection; careful use of magnetic disk as a cache and of secure coprocessors on the DBMS platform and compliance storage server platform; and judicious retargeting of an on-disk encryption unit.

This work enables compliance laws to be applied to business, government, and personal data now stored in databases, increasing societal confidence in such data. A new web course on compliance data management will raise the computer science community's awareness of compliance issues and will help train a new generation of professionals cognizant of these challenges and solutions.

Investigators:

• Sion - IIS 0803197
• Snodgrass - IIS 0803229
• Winslett - IIS 0803280

Sponsors:

The National Science Foundation through IIS 0803197, 0803229, 0803280