Fine grained access rights definition in a three tiered information system

Three-tiered information systems often use application-level authentication and authorization schemes. In these architectures, successful attacks to the application server layer offer the attacker unlimited access to the database. The proposed solution to this problem is based on a set of views employing session-scope data to determine the effective user rights. These views are generated from formal description of user and group access rights rules using a XSLT-based generator. In this system, an attacker would see only empty views even in the case he gained full access to the application server. Such a system was successfully implemented and deployed to a large DataPile system with more than 50,000 users with different access rights.