Secure Groups: Enhanced Management of Encrypted Data in Databases

Abstract

Modern database systems integrate diverse technology to implement data security. One important aspect of the security scheme is about using encryption to protect sensitive information while it remains stored in the database. We first review in this paper the general aspects of data security and analyze how the leading commercial databases address these issues. Then we discuss about applying encryption as a justified measure of increasing the data privacy and we identify a weak support from commercial database systems when a group of users owns encrypted data. Finally, we propose an enhanced mechanism, called secure groups, that intends to improve the management of encryption at a database level