PolicyReplay: Misconfiguration-Response Queries for Data Breach Reporting

Recent legislation has increased the requirements of organizations to report data breaches, or unauthorized access to data. While access control policies are used to restrict access to a database, these policies are complex and difficult to configure. As a result, misconfigurations sometimes allow users access to unauthorized data. In this paper, we consider the problem of reporting data breaches after such a misconfiguration is detected. To locate past SQL queries that may have revealed unauthorized information, we introduce the novel idea of a misconfiguration response (MR) query. The MRquery cleanly addresses the challenges of information propagation within the database by replaying the log of operations and returning all logged queries for which the result has changed due to the misconfiguration. A strawman implementation of the MR-query would go back in time and replay all the operations that occurred in the interim, with the correct policy. However, re-executing all operations i...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: PVLDB
• Authors: Daniel Fabbri, Kristen LeFevre, Qiang Zhu
• Keywords: Access Control Policies, Data Breaches, PVLDB 2010, Unauthorized