AccKW: An Efficient Access Control Scheme for Keyword-Based Search over RDBMS

Access control for relational databases is a well researched area. An SQL query is allowed or denied access to database according to the specified access control policy. On the other side, there has been a surge in research activities to provide keywords-based search interface over RDBMS. This has posed new challenges for access control enforcement as traditional solutions to access control will not be efficient for keyword-based search. This paper proposes a framework AccKW, which enforces access control policies on keyword-based search over RDBMS in the early phases of keywords based search process. The main contributions of this paper are twofold: (i) we have investigated the problem of access control in the domain of keyword-based search over relational databases, and (ii) we have implemented the framework AccKW, and found out that AccKW outperforms in terms of execution time as compared to the naive approach (brute force approach) in case of strict access control policy.