Several security evaluation methods have been proposed
in the past. For example, the Orange Book [12] and the
Common Criteria for Information Technology Security
Evaluation [8] define a set of generic rules that allow
developers to specify the security attributes of their products,
and evaluators to verify if products actually meet their
claims. Another example is the red team strategy [12], which
consists of a group of experts trying to hack a given
computer system to evaluate security. To the best of our
knowledge, none of these security evaluation methods is
oriented towards security comparison, and they are too
complex to be used to compare software packages in real
environments, where the administrators have limited
resources and security knowledge.
In [16] the authors propose an approach to classify the
security mechanisms of database systems. In this approach
the DBMS are classified using a set of security classes.
However, the list of mechanisms presented in the paper is
limited as it is based on the actual mechanisms already
implemented in most DBMS engines. In our approach, we
devise the mechanisms from security best practices without
considering what was or was not implemented in modern
DBMS engines, thus having a much more relevant and
detailed list of security mechanisms.