Evaluation of Data Integrity Methods in Storage: Oracle Database

Abstract: Context. It is very common today that e-commerce systems store sensitiveclient information. The database administrators of these typesof systems have access to this sensitive client information and are ableto manipulate it. Therefore, data integrity is of core importance inthese systems and methods to detect fraudulent behavior need to beimplemented. Objectives. The objective of this thesis is to implement and evaluatethe features and performance impact of different methods for achievingdata integrity in a database, Oracle to be more exact.Methods. Five methods for achieving data integrity were tested.The methods were tested in a controlled environment. Three of themwas tested and performance evaluated by a tool emulating a real lifee-commerce scenario. The focus of this thesis is to evaluate the performanceimpact and the fraud detection ability of the implementedmethods. Results. This paper evaluates traditional Digital signature, Linkedtimestamping applied to a Merkle hash tree and Auditing performanceimpact and feature impact wise. Two more methods were implementedand tested in a controlled environment, Merkle hash tree and Digitalwatermarking. We showed results from the empirical analysis, dataverification and transaction performance. In our evaluation we provedour hypothesis that traditional Digital signature is faster than Linkedtimestamping. Conclusions. In this thesis we conclude that when choosing a dataintegrity method to implement it is of great importance to know whichtype of operation is more frequently used. Our experiments show thatthe Digital signature method performed better than Linked timestampingand Auditing. Our experiments did also conclude that applicationof Digital signature, Linked timestamping and Auditing decreasedthe performance by 4%, 12% and 27% respectively, which is arelatively small price to pay for data integrity.