Security and integrity, Database Management System

Assignment Help:

Security And Integrity

After Reading the concepts of database recovery in the last section, let us now deal with a vital concept that helps in minimizing consistency errors in database systems. These are the concepts of database integrity and security.

Information security is the protection of information against unauthorised disclosure, destruction or alteration.  Database security is the protection of information that is keeps in a database.  It deals with ensuring only the "right people" get the right to access the "right data".  By right people we mean those people who have the right to update / access the data that they are requesting to update / access with the database.

This should also make sure the confidentiality of the data.  For instance, in an educational institution, information about a student's grades should be made available only to that student, while only the university authorities should be able to update that information. Likewise, personal information of the employees should be accessible only to the authorities concerned and not to everyone.  Another instance can be the medical records of patients in a hospital. These should be available only to health care officials.

Therefore, one of the concepts of database security is primarily a specification of access rules about who has what type of access to what information. This is also called as the problem of Authorisation.  These access rules are defined at the time database is described.  The person who writes access rules is known as the authoriser.  The process of guaranteed that information and other protected objects are accessed only in authorised ways is known as access control. There may be other forms of security relating to operating system, physical, communication aspects of databases. Though, in this unit, we will confine ourselves mainly to authorisation and access control using easy commands.

The term integrity is also applied to data and to the mechanism that helps to make sure its consistency.  Integrity shows to the avoidance of accidental loss of consistency. Protection of database contents from unauthorised access contains legal and ethical issues, organization policies and database management policies.  To protect database various levels of security measures are maintained:

 1)  Physical:  The site or sites having the computer system must be physically secured against illegal entry of unauthorised persons.

2)  Human: An approval is given to a user to decrease the chance of any information leakage and unwanted manipulations.

3)  Operating System: Even though foolproof security methods are taken to secure database systems, weakness in the operating system security might serve as a means of unauthorised access to the database.

4)  Network:  Since databases permit distributed or remote access by terminals or network, software level security within the network software is a main issue.

5)  Database system: The data items in a database require a fine level of access control. For instance, a user may only be permitted to read a data item and is permitted to issue queries but would not be permitted to deliberately change the data. It is the responsibility of the database system to make sure that these access restrictions are not violated.

To make sure database security needs implementation of security at all the levels as above. The Database Administrator (DBA) is responsible for executing the database security policies in a database system. The organisation or data owners make these policies. DBA makes or cancels the user accounts assigning appropriate security rights to user accounts as well as power of granting and revoking certain privileges further to other users.


Related Discussions:- Security and integrity

Explain trigger, What is Trigger? A trigger is a SQL procedure that ini...

What is Trigger? A trigger is a SQL procedure that initiates an action when an event (INSERT, DELETE or UPDATE) occurs. Triggers are kept in and managed by the DBMS. Triggers a

Outer join, Outer Join: The use of Outer Join is that it still joins those...

Outer Join: The use of Outer Join is that it still joins those tuples that do not have matching values in common columns are also contained in the result table. Outer join places

Log, what is the need of a log in dbms

what is the need of a log in dbms

Express the ways provided by mysql for pattern matching, Express the ways p...

Express the ways provided by MySQL for Pattern Matching? MySQL provides two kinds of pattern matching. 1) One is based on SQL patterns 2) Regular expressions.

Example of ancestry database , Ancestry database records information about ...

Ancestry database records information about family trees . Following information is recorded about each person: FIRSTNAME first name SURNAME surname MNAME maiden name (if

Drop table command, DROP TABLE Command: When an existing object is not ...

DROP TABLE Command: When an existing object is not needed for further use, it is always better to eliminate it from the database. To remove the existing object from the databas

What is completeness constraint on generalization, What is completeness con...

What is completeness constraint on generalization? Define the variation between total and partial design constraint. Give an example each.       Ans: Completeness Constraints

Describe the menu based interfaces for web clients browsing, Describe the M...

Describe the Menu based interfaces for web clients or browsing? Menu-Based Interfaces for Web Clients or Browsing - These interfaces present the user along with lists of option

Explain the internal architecture of 8086, Problem 1. Write an assembly...

Problem 1. Write an assembly program to find the smallest among two numbers Writing an assembly program to find the smallest among two numbers 2. Explain the intern

Write Your Message!

Captcha
Free Assignment Quote

Assured A++ Grade

Get guaranteed satisfaction & time on delivery in every assignment order you paid with us! We ensure premium quality solution document along with free turntin report!

All rights reserved! Copyrights ©2019-2020 ExpertsMind IT Educational Pvt Ltd