Trustworthy vacuuming and litigation holds in long-term high-integrity records retention

Relational databases are periodically vacuumed to remove tuples that have expired. During the discovery phase of litigation, plaintiffs ask defendants for access to information related to their case. The requested information is then subject to a litigation hold, which means that the information cannot be deleted. Vacuuming exposes a database to a new threat – adversaries can try to thwart database auditing mechanism by masquerading an illegal tuple deletion as a vacuuming operation, and delete an unexpired tuple, or a tuple under a litigation hold. In this paper, we provide a generic framework for auditing vacuuming, augment existing database integrity audit mechanisms to support vacuuming, formalize the notion of a litigation hold, and identify key issues in the context of database systems for long-term, high-integrity records retention. Then, we propose several schemes for efficiently implementing trustworthy litigation holds. Finally, we evaluate the efficiency and tradeoffs o...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: EDBT
• Authors: Ragib Hasan, Marianne Winslett
• Keywords: Database, Database Auditing Mechanism, EDBT 2010, Litigation Holds