Design and Evaluation of A Data Partitioning-Based Intrusion Management Architecture for Database Systems

Abstract: Data-intensive applications exhibit increasing reliance on Database Management Systems (DBMSs, for short). With the growing cyber-security threats to government and commercial infrastructures, the need to develop high resilient cyber systems is becoming increasingly important. Cyber-attacks on DBMSs include intrusion attacks that may result in severe degradation in performance. Several efforts have been directed towards designing an integrated management system to detect, respond, and recover from malicious attacks. In this paper, we propose a data Partitioning-based Intrusion Management System (PIMS, for short) that can endure intense malicious intrusion attacks on DBMS. The novelty in PIMS is the ability to contain the damage into data partitions, termed Intrusion Boundaries (IBs, for short). The IB Demarcation Problem (IBDP, for short) is formulated as a mixed integer nonlinear programming. We prove that IBDP is NP-hard. Accordingly, two heuristic solutions for IBDP are introduced. The proposed architecture for PIMS includes novel IB-centric response and recovery mechanisms, which executes compensating transactions. PIMS is prototyped within PostgreSQL, an open-source DBMS. Finally, empirical and experimental performance evaluation of PIMS are conducted to demonstrate that intelligent partitioning of data tuples improves the overall availability of the DBMS under intrusion attacks.