Corrupting DBMS's
Adeel Pervez and Josh Woleben
Abstract:
Modern database systems store critical data such as financial
transactions, health records, research results, and government
data. Continuous access to this data and its integrity are crucial to the
business, academic and government environments that rely on them. Database
system downtime or data loss can cause millions of dollars in lost business
and productivity, and can even result in liability. In this paper we have
explored two modern database systems to test their reaction to various types
of corruption. We explored a closed source, proprietary system from
Intersystems Corporation called Cache, and an open-source database system
called PostgreSQL. To accomplish this, fault injection at the pointer level
and data structure level was used, then the database tested and its reaction,
if any, was recorded. We found that both database systems lack in integrity
recovery and could use improvement.
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