Database Security Issues for Real-Time Electronic Commerce Systems

Data management and transaction processing are essential in supporting advanced time-critical applications. In many of these applications, security is another important requirement. Security is especially critical in electronic commerce applications where databases often maintain and provide sensitive information. In electronic commerce, service providers are sensitive to the needs of the clients, including the implicit (or explicit) timing constraints. If providing full security to each activity causes the system to become less timely, the service providers would be reluctant in providing necessary security guarantees. Therefore, it is important to consider multiple security service levels for applications such as electronic commerce. In this paper we address issues that the system designers should consider for supporting both requirements of timeliness and security. We discuss the issues for transaction and data modeling, and present the notion of partial security. We also discuss a specification language that allows the designer to specify important properties of the database at an appropriate level to support partial security.