VideoAcM: a transitive and temporal access control mechanism for collaborative video database production applications

Access control models play an important role in database management systems. In general, there are three basic access control models: Discretionary Access Control (DAC), Mandatory Access Control (MAC), and Non-Discretionary Access Control (NAC). Currently, the majority of commercial DBMSs provide only DAC, and some temporal access control models have been derived based on either DAC or NAC. In the context of video database applications, since the structure of video data is complex in nature, it requires a specific and tailor-made access control mechanism which should include MAC as well as DAC and NAC. However, only few efforts have been put on access control models for video database systems. In this paper, a transitive and temporal access control mechanism for collaborative video database production applications has been proposed, which subsumes the properties of DAC, MAC, and NAC. Moreover, our proposed mechanism is integrated with the intellectual property concerns by constructing an access control hierarchy of video data with authorization rules. In particular, our mechanism can derive novel authorization rules not only on conventional client-data access control, but also on data–data access control. Besides video data, the proposed model is applicable to other data types which exhibit a hierarchical data structure.