Title: Attack recovery from malicious transactions in distributed database systems

Authors: A. Chakraborty, M.K. Garg, A.K. Majumdar, S. Sural

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, Kharagpur – 721302, India. ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, Kharagpur – 721302, India. ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, Kharagpur – 721302, India. ' School of Information Technology, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, Kharagpur – 721302, India

Abstract: Database protection mechanisms often fail to prevent occurrence of malicious transactions. In this paper, we consider the problem of database recovery from such committed malicious transactions in distributed database systems. In a database, the result of one transaction may affect the execution of some of the later transactions. This leads to damage spreading, which makes attack recovery even more complex. Traditional recovery schemes usually perform complete rollback to undo the effect of all the transactions, both malicious as well as non-malicious. We define several useful dependency relationships among transactions and present an algorithm to restore the consistency of a distributed database by negating the effect of only those transactions that are directly or transitively dependent on the malicious transactions.

Keywords: database intrusion; distributed databases; attack recovery; transaction dependency graph; compensation; information security; computer security; malicious transactions; database recovery.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICS.2008.018519

International Journal of Information and Computer Security, 2008 Vol.2 No.2, pp.197 - 217

Published online: 26 May 2008 *

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