Abstract
Multilevel security poses many challenging problems for transaction processing. The challenges are due to the conflicting requirements imposed by confidentiality, integrity, and availability-the three components of security. We identify these requirements on transaction processing in Multilevel Secure (MLS) database management systems (DBMSs) and survey the efforts of a number of researchers to meet these requirements. While our emphasis is primarily on centralized systems based on kernelized architecture, we briefly overview the research in the distributed MLS DBMSs as well.