Fossilized Index: The Linchpin of Trustworthy Non-Alterable Electronic Records

As critical records are increasingly stored in electronic form, which tends to make for easy destruction and clandestine modification, it is imperative that they be properly managed to preserve their trustworthiness, i.e., their ability to provide irrefutable proof and accurate details of events that have occurred. The need for proper record keeping is further underscored by the recent corporate misconduct and ensuing attempts to destroy incriminating records. Currently, the industry practice and regulatory requirements (e.g., SEC Rule 17a-4) rely on storing records in WORM storage to immutably preserve the records. In this paper, we contend that simply storing records in WORM storage is increasingly inadequate to ensure that they are trustworthy. Specifically, with the large volume of records that are typical today, meeting the ever more stringent query response time requires the use of direct access mechanisms such as indexes. Relying on indexes for accessing records could, however,...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: SIGMOD
• Authors: Qingbo Zhu, Windsor W. Hsu
• Keywords: Critical Records, Database, SIGMOD 2005, Storing Records, WORM Storage