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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 172–176Cite as

Auditing and Forensic Analysis

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Synonyms

Accountability; Monitoring

Definition

The goal of database auditing is to retain a secure record of database operations that can be used to verify compliance with desired security policies, to trace policy violations, or to detect anomalous patterns of access. An audit log can contain the authorization ID and time stamp of read and write operations in the database, as well as a record of server connections, login attempts and authorization changes. Government and institutional regulations for the management of sensitive information often require auditing of data disclosure and data modification.

Database forensicsis the analysis of the state of a database system to validate hypotheses about past events that are relevant to an alleged crime or violation of policy. Evidence supporting a forensic analysis may be found in an audit log (if available) but may also be recovered from any other component of a database system including table storage, the transaction log, temporary...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Adam N.R. and Wortmann J.C. Security-control methods for statistical databases: A comparative study. ACM Comput. Surv., 21(4):515–556, 1989.

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  2. Agrawal R., Bayardo R.J., Faloutsos C., Kiernan J., Rantzau R., and Srikant R. Auditing compliance with a hippocratic database. In Proc. 30th Int. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases, 2004, pp. 516–527.

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  3. Ammann P., Jajodia S., and Liu P. Recovery from malicious transactions. IEEE Trans, Knowl. Data Eng., 14(5):1167–1185, 2002.

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  4. Castano S., Fugini M.G., Martella G., and Samarati P. Database security. ACM/Addison-Wesley, New York, NY, USA, 1994.

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  5. Jensen C.S., Mark L., and Roussopoulos N. Incremental implementation model for relational databases with transaction time. IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng., 3(4):461–473, 1991.

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  6. Lomet D., Vagena Z., and Barga R. Recovery from “bad” user transactions. In Proc. ACM SIGMOD Int. Conf. on Management of Data, 2006, pp. 337–346.

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  7. Snodgrass R.T. and Collberg C.S. The τ-BerkeleyDB temporal subsystem. Available at www.cs.arizona.edu/tau/tbdb/.

  8. Snodgrass R.T. and Collberg C.S. The τ-MySQL transaction time support. Available at www.cs.arizona.edu/tau/tmysql.

  9. Stahlberg P., Miklau G., and Levine B. Threats to privacy in the forensic analysis of database systems. In Proc. ACM SIGMOD Int. Conf. on Management of Data, 2007, pp. 91–102.

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  10. Waters B., Balfanz D., Durfee G., and Smetters D. Building an encrypted and searchable audit log. In Proc. Network and Dist. Syst. Security Symp., 2004, pp. 91–102.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA

    Brian Levine & Gerome Miklau

Authors
  1. Brian Levine
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  2. Gerome Miklau
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Levine, B., Miklau, G. (2009). Auditing and Forensic Analysis. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_30

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