An implementation design of a fine-grained database access control policy consistency checking mechanism

Policy consistency checker is an essential part of database access control systems. Realizing checking mechanisms for policy inconsistencies is a non-trivial task due to large amounts of rules and various kinds of rule patterns on fine-grained database objects and complicated interrelationships among those rules. We propose a novel rule-based mechanism for checking fine-grained access control policy inconsistencies for relational databases. In particular, we present necessary concepts and implementation design of the inconsistency checking mechanism. We specify policies, with conditions, on fine-grained objects through if-then authorization rules. We compute rule inconsistencies by employing the java-based open-source rule engine Jess.