Multilevel secure data stream processing: Architecture and implementation

The proliferation of sensors and mobile devices and their connectedness to the network have given rise to numerous types of situation monitoring applications. Data Stream Management Systems (DSMSs) have been proposed to address the data processing needs of such applications that require collection of high-speed data, computing results on-the-fly, and taking actions in real-time. Although a lot of work appears in the area of DSMS, not much has been done in multilevel secure (MLS) DSMS making the technology unsuitable for highly sensitive applications, such as battlefield monitoring. An MLSDSMS should ensure the absence of illegal information flow in a DSMS and more importantly provide the performance needed to handle continuous queries. We illustrate why the traditional DSMSs cannot be used for processing multilevel secure continuous queries and discuss various DSMS architectures for processing such queries. We implement one such architecture and demonstrate how it processes continuous queries. In order to provide better quality of service and memory usage in a DSMS, we show how continuous queries submitted by various users can be shared. We provide experimental evaluations to demonstrate the performance benefits achieved through query sharing.