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Details of Grant
 
EPSRC Reference: GR/T27433/01
Title: A Security Model For XML
Principal Investigator: Professor W Fan
Other Investigators:
Professor OP Buneman
Researcher Co-investigator:
Project Partner:
Department: Sch of Informatics
Organisation: University of Edinburgh
Scheme: Standard Research
Starts: 01 July 2005 Ends: 30 June 2008 Value (£): 309,596
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Fundamentals of Computing Information and Knowledge Management
Software Engineering
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Communications
Related Grants:
Panel History:  
Summary
In response to the increasing need for XML security, the proposed research is to develop the first security model for XML that supports flexible access-policy specifications, access and inference control, efficient enforcement techniques for access policies, and schema availability. The novelty of our model consists in the following:

(a) access policies specified upon a document DTD or XML Schema (at the conceptual level) as opposed to annotating data elements in the database (at the physical level) by previous systems;

(b) a notion of security views, which provide for each user group an XML view characterizing all and only the information that the users are authorised to access, and a view schema that the XML view conforms to in order to facilitate query formulation/optimisation;

(c) algorithms for automatically deriving a security view from an access-control specification; and

(d) algorithms for efficiently rewriting and optimizing XML queries over the views to equivalent queries over the original documents, such that the views do not need to be materialised. The proposed research is also to investigate fundamental issues in connection with XML security such as the expressive power/complexity of access specifications and reasoning techniques for security views. We expect to develop a clean security theory for XML as well as effective, efficient and practical tools.
Final Report Summary
In response to the increasing need for XML security, the proposed research is to develop the first security model for XML that supports flexible access-policy specifications, access and inference control, efficient enforcement techniques for access policies, and schema availability. The novelty of our model consists in the following:

(a) access policies specified upon a document DTD or XML Schema (at the conceptual level) as opposed to annotating data elements in the database (at the physical level) by previous systems;

(b) a notion of security views, which provide for each user group an XML view characterizing all and only the information that the users are authorised to access, and a view schema that the XML view conforms to in order to facilitate query formulation/optimisation;

(c) algorithms for automatically deriving a security view from an access-control specification; and

(d) algorithms for efficiently rewriting and optimizing XML queries over the views to equivalent queries over the original documents, such that the views do not need to be materialised. The proposed research is also to investigate fundamental issues in connection with XML security such as the expressive power/complexity of access specifications and reasoning techniques for security views. We expect to develop a clean security theory for XML as well as effective, efficient and practical tools.
Further Information:  
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