PhD Qualifying Examination


"A Survey of Query Processing on Secured Databases"

By Mr. Ho-Lam Lau


Abstract:

Security has long been an important challenge in information industry, and
this challenge is intensifying in database research due to the fact that
enormous popularity of Web Information relying on backended database
servers. In addition, with the advance of hand-held devices and wireless
networking, which also enable mobile users to access their data at any
time and from anywhere.

For reasons of cost and convenience, users often store their data on
remote servers for better connectivity. Traditional database management
systems (DBMS) protected against a malicious intruder by means of an
access control mechanism on whole relations or views. However, it fails to
keep the queries and the returned answers secure. For example, when the
data is outsourced on the untrusted server, data is often encrypted in
order to ensure the confidentiality. However, encrypted data is hard to be
retrieved from the server, since traditional DBMSs lack native support on
querying encrypted data. In addition, there is no granularity access
control, such as tuples or attribute values, for a relation. Obviously,
the naive approach that downloads all the data, then performs decryption
and processes the database queries over the decrypted data on a local
machine is inefficient. This is also not practical for some modern
applications such as mobile devices with limited bandwidth and memory.

This survey focuses on the approaches of implementing encryption in
database systems and the query processing in these methodologies. We
review the security issues in the traditional database systems and look
into the difficulties and challenges of implementing encryption into
database system. We then review the solutions of DBMS security proposed by
the database vendors nowadays and some proposals of query processing
techniques on encrypted databases in recent literature. Finally, we
discuss some interesting problems for future research, such as the issues
of querying, updating and indexing encrypted databases.



Date:     		Friday, 18 March 2005

Time:                   2:00p.m.-4:00p.m.

Venue:                  Room 2407
			lifts 17-18

Committee Members:      Dr. Wilfred Ng (Supervisor)
			Dr. Cunsheng Ding (Chairperson)
			Prof. Dik-Lun Lee
			Dr. Qiong Luo


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