Secure and Efficient Query Evaluation on XML Databases

Hui (Wendy) Wang
University of British Columbia

Thursday, April 5, 11:00AM
Babbio Center, Room 202
Stevens Institute of Technology
 

Abstract


Database security is of utmost importance today. To protect the secrecy of data, we must define and enforce some security policies. However, the enforcement of those security polices on the database will bring unavoidable overhead for query evaluation. Sometimes such overhead is very expensive. For example, the database may be encrypted to increase security. In this case, answering a query requires first decrypting the data. The decryption cost may be more expensive than the cost of query evaluation itself.

In this talk, I describe two pieces of my work that optimize the overhead caused by securing data in XML databases. The first focuses on encrypted XML database and the second focuses on access-controlled XML databases. My work proves that by optimization, the queries can be answered efficiently, while the data is still securely protected.