Modernizing Secure OLAP Applications with a Model-Driven Approach

The majority of the organizations store their historical business information in data warehouses which are queried to make strategic decisions by using online analytical processing (OLAP) tools. This information has to be correctly assured against unauthorized accesses, but nevertheless there are a great amount of legacy OLAP applications that have been developed without considering security aspects or these have been incorporated once the system was implemented. This work defines a reverse engineering process that allows us to obtain the conceptual model corresponding to a legacy OLAP application, and also analyses and represents the security aspects that could have established. This process has been aligned with a model-driven architecture for developing secure OLAP applications by defining the transformations needed to automatically apply it. Once the conceptual model has been extracted, it can be easily modified and improved with security, and automatically transformed to generate the new implementation.

This research is part of the following projects: SERENIDAD (PEII11-037-7035) financed by the ‘Viceconsejería de Ciencia y Tecnología de la Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha’ (Spain) and FEDER, and SIGMA-CC (TIN2012-36904) and GEODAS (TIN2012-37493-C03-01) financed by the ‘Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad’ (Spain).