Starvation-free secure multiversion concurrency control

Concurrency control is important for multilevel secure databases because a covert channel can be easily created through collaboration of multilevel transactions in most traditional concurrency control mechanisms. We, in this paper, propose a secure multiversion concurrency control mechanism. We present concepts of an invisible area and a t-lock to prevent retrieval anomaly and starvation of high transactions that may often occur in the previous works on secure concurrency control. Our proposed method prevents the creation of covert channel without retrieval anomaly and starvation of high transactions while providing serializable schedules for multilevel transactions. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.