Hiding the Source Code of Stored Database Programs

• Main Authors: Vitalii Yesin, Mikolaj Karpinski, Maryna Yesina, Vladyslav Vilihura, Kornel Warwas
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-12-01
• Series: Information
• Subjects: data security; database; data masking; stored program
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/11/12/576

The objective of the article is to reveal an approach to hiding the code of stored programs stored in the database. The essence of this approach is the complex use of the method of random permutation of code symbols related to a specific stored program, located in several rows of some attribute of the database system table, as well as the substitution method. Moreover, with the possible substitute of each character obtained after the permutation with another one randomly selected from the Unicode standard, a legitimate user with the appropriate privileges gets access to the source code of the stored program due to the ability to quickly perform the inverse to masking transformation and overwrite the program code into the database. All other users and attackers without knowledge of certain information can only read the codes of stored programs masked with format preserving. The proposed solution is more efficient than the existing methods of hiding the code of stored programs provided by the developers of some modern database management systems (DBMS), since an attacker will need much greater computational and time consumption to disclose the source code of stored programs.