Advancing database security: a comprehensive systematic mapping study of potential challenges

The value of data to a company means that it must be protected. When it comes to safeguarding their local and worldwide databases, businesses face a number of challenges. To systematically review the literature to highlight the difficulties in establishing, implementing, and maintaining secure databases. In order to better understand database system problems, we did a systematic mapping study (SMS). We’ve analyzed 100 research publications from different digital libraries and found 20 issues after adopting inclusion and exclusion criteria. This SMS study aimed to identify the most up-to-date research in database security and the different challenges faced by users/clients using various databases from a software engineering perspective. In total, 20 challenges were identified related to database security. Our results show that “weak authorization system”, “weak access control”, “privacy issues/data leakage”, “lack of NOP security”, and “database attacks” as the most frequently cited critical challenges. Further analyses were performed to show different challenges with respect to different phases of the software development lifecycle, venue of publications, types of database attacks, and active research institutes/universities researching database security. The organizations should implement adequate mitigation strategies to address the identified database challenges. This research will also provide a direction for new research in this area.