ABSTRACT
In this chapter we discuss approaches to processing security constraints to handle the inference problem. Back in 1987 we introduced the notion of security constraints, which are rules that assign security levels to the data (see [DWYE87]). We also designed and developed an architecture for a database management system augmented with inference engines to handle the inference problem by processing the security constraints. Our initial work on the inference problem was published in [THUR87] and elaborated on in [THUR90]. This work spawned several activities on the inference problem and security-constraint processing (see also [THUR93] and [THUR95]). This chapter essentially summarizes our work on security constraint processing.
