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DBKnot: A Transparent and Seamless, Pluggable, Tamper Evident Database

14 pagesPublished: October 4, 2021

Abstract

Database tampering is a key security threat that impacts the integrity of sensitive in- formation of crucial businesses. The evolving risks of security threats as well as regulatory compliance are important driving forces for achieving better integrity and detecting pos- sible data tampering by either internal or external malicious perpetrators. We present DBKnot, an architecture for a tamper detection solution that caters to such problem while maintaining seamlessness and ease of retrofitting into existing append-only database ap- plications with near-zero modifications. We also pay attention to data confidentiality by making sure that the data never leaves the organization’s premises. We leverage designs like chains of record hashes to achieve the target solution. A set of preliminary exper- iments have been conducted that resulted in DBKnot adding an overhead equal to the original transaction time. We have run the same experimemts experiments with different parallelization and pipelining versions of DBKnot which resulted in cutting approximately 66% of the added overhead.

Keyphrases: database, hash chaining, security, tamper evident

In: Frederick Harris, Rui Wu and Alex Redei (editors). Proceedings of ISCA 30th International Conference on Software Engineering and Data Engineering, vol 77, pages 90-103.

BibTeX entry
@inproceedings{SEDE2021:DBKnot_Transparent_Seamless_Pluggable,
  author    = {Islam Khalil and Sherif El-Kassas and Karim Sobh},
  title     = {DBKnot: A Transparent and Seamless, Pluggable, Tamper Evident Database},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of ISCA 30th International Conference on Software Engineering and Data Engineering},
  editor    = {Frederick Harris and Rui Wu and Alex Redei},
  series    = {EPiC Series in Computing},
  volume    = {77},
  publisher = {EasyChair},
  bibsource = {EasyChair, https://easychair.org},
  issn      = {2398-7340},
  url       = {/publications/paper/1Rl7},
  doi       = {10.29007/7l81},
  pages     = {90-103},
  year      = {2021}}
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