Securely sharing data in encrypted databases

Collaborative design and application integration emphasize the demand for database security. Database encryption is widely adopted to ensure data privacy, which can prevent attacks from both outside intruders and inside malicious users. Current researches on this area are mainly focusing on encryption algorithms, key management and encryption efficiency. However, data sharing nature of database system is usually neglected. In this paper, we propose an access control model, 3S-RBAC, which enables data sharing while guaranteeing privacy. The model has many features: the novel concept of strong permission and weak permission; the hierarchy of database objects and keys; the permission and key inheritance; the binding of keys and permissions. Implementation in OSCAR Secure DBMS shows that the model is flexible, secure, practical, and can be integrated easily into existing enterprise applications.