Auditing capability is one of the requirements for secure databases. A secure database management system, among other things, has to provide not only facilities for recording the history of all updates and queries against the database but high-level support for querying this history as well. The authors present an audit model for object-oriented databases that satisfies both requirements. The model offers several additional advantages: (1) it imposes a uniform logical structure upon both the current and the audit data: (2) it results in zero-information loss, i.e. there is never any loss of historical or current information in this model; and (3) since it captures the entire database activity, a complete reconstruction of every action taken on the database is possible. They show how this third aspect can be exploited to provide high-level support for expressing audit and other database queries and therefore, they make a complete audit trail methodology available.
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