Abstract

The importance of databases in modern businesses and governmental institutions is huge and still growing. Many mission-critical applications and business processes rely on databases. These databases contain data of different degree of importance and confidentiality, and are accessed by a wide variety of users. Integrity violations for a database can have serious impact on business processes; disclosure of confidential data in some cases has the same effect. Traditional database security provides techniques and strategies to handle such problems with respect to database servers in a non-mobile context.

For many businesses applications are going mobile that means using enterprise data in a mobile context, thus using a mobile DBMS. With these new developments the business data of an enterprise can be made available to an even larger number of users and a wider range of applications than before.

To work on business data anytime and anywhere is the major goal pursued by developing mobility support in database context. The confidentiality of mission- critical data must be ensured, even though most mobile devices do not provide a secure environment for storage of such data.
Security requirements that apply to a central company database should apply similarly and in an appropriate manner to the parts of the database replicated on mobile devices in the field. A mobile database security infrastructure is needed to accomplish this goal. When developing such an infrastructure we can benefit from the results of traditional database security work. But we also need to adapt the existing techniques and strategies to the mobile context, and we need to develop new ones that attack certain issues specific to use of database systems in a mobile environment.