A Semantic Cache Framework for Secure XML Queries

Secure XML query answering to protect data privacy and semantic cache to speed up XML query answering are two hot spots in current research areas of XML database systems. While both issues are explored respectively in depth, they have not been studied together, that is, the problem of semantic cache for secure XML query answering has not been addressed yet. In this paper, we present an interesting joint of these two aspects and propose an efficient framework of semantic cache for secure XML query answering, which can improve the performance of XML database systems under secure circumstances. Our framework combines access control, user privilege management over XML data and the state-of-the-art semantic XML query cache techniques, to ensure that data are presented only to authorized users in an efficient way. To the best of our knowledge, the approach we propose here is among the first beneficial efforts in a novel perspective of combining caching and security for XML database to improve system performance. The efficiency of our framework is verified by comprehensive experiments.