An Extended Authorization Model for Relational Databases

We propose two extensions to the authorization model for relational databases defined originally by Griffiths and Wade. The first extension concerns a new type of revoke operation, called noncascading revoke operation. The original model contains a single, cascading revoke operation, meaning that when a privilege is revoked from a user, a recursive revocation takes place that deletes all authorizations granted by this user that do not have other supporting authorizations. The new type of revocation avoids the recursive revocation of authorizations. The second extension concerns negative authorization which permits specification of explicit denial for a user to access an object under a particular mode. We also address the management of views and groups with respect to the proposed extensions.