Rewriting Histories: Recovering from Malicious Transactions

  • Authors:

  • Peng Liu;Paul Ammann;Sushil Jajodia

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Information Systems, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD 212 150, USA. pliu@umbc.edu;Center for Secure Information Systems, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA. pammann@gmu.edu;Center for Secure Information Systems, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA. jajodia@gmu.edu

  • Venue:
  • Distributed and Parallel Databases - Security of data and transaction processing
  • Year:
  • 2000

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

We consider recovery from malicious but committed transactions.Traditional recovery mechanisms do not address this problem,except for complete rollbacks,which undo the work of good transactions as well as malicious ones, and compensating transactions,whose utility depends on application semantics.We develop an algorithm that rewrites execution historiesfor the purpose of backing out malicious transactions.Good transactions that are affected,directly or indirectly, by malicious transactionscomplicate the process of backing out undesirable transactions.We show that the prefix of a rewritten history produced by the algorithm serializes exactly the set of unaffected good transactions.The suffix of the rewritten history includes special stateinformation to describe affected good transactions as well as malicious transactions.We describe techniques that can extract additionalgood transactions from this latter part of a rewritten history.The latter processing saves more good transactionsthan is possible with a dependency-graph based approach to recovery.