Performance Evaluation of Concurrency Control Algorithm for Multilevel Secure Distributed Databases

Majority of the research in multilevel secure database management systems (MLS/DBMS) focuses primarily on centralized database systems. However, with the demand for higher performance and higher availability, database systems have moved from centralized to distributed architectures, and the research in distributed database management systems (MLS/DDBMS) is gaining more and more prominence. Concurrency control is an integral part of database systems. Secure concurrency control algorithms [15,17,18,29,] proposed in literature achieve correctness and security at the cost of declined performance of high security level transactions. These algorithms infringe the fairness in processing transactions at different security levels. Though the performance of different concurrency control algorithms have been explored extensively for centralized multilevel secure database management systems [11,31] but to the best of author’s knowledge the relative performance of transactions at different security levels using secure concurrency control algorithm for has not been reported yet. To fill this gap, this paper presents a detailed simulation model of a multilevel secure distributed database system and investigates the performance price paid for maintaining security in a MLS/DDBMS. The paper investigates the relative performance of transactions at different security levels.