Membrane - Safe and Performant Data Access Controls in Apache Spark in the Presence of Imperative Code

Summary: Membrane enforces fine‑grained row/column policies for Spark (SQL and imperative UDF/map‑reduce) by rewriting query plans to insert security boundaries, mitigating info‑disclosure and privilege‑escalation from embedded user code. Key idea: split the Spark driver into two to isolate policy enforcement without heavyweight containerization, achieving secure controls with negligible performance and cost overhead on EMR. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 13585
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2024
Pagerank: 5.2922419e-05
Overall Rank: 5,876 | 59.13%
DOI: 10.14778/3685800.3685808

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 1 of 1 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
9,093	Databricks Lakeguard: Supporting Fine-grained Access Control and Multi-user Capabilities for Apache Spark Workloads	2025	SIGMOD	4.398149e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 9 of 9 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
66	Spark SQL: Relational Data Processing in Spark	2015	SIGMOD	0.00061639801
454	An Overview of Query Optimization in Relational Systems	1998	PODS	0.00022734812
607	Extending Query Rewriting Techniques for Fine-Grained Access Control	2004	SIGMOD	0.00019266724
659	The Making of TPC-DS	2006	VLDB	0.00018500853
1,787	Limiting Disclosure in Hippocratic Databases	2004	VLDB	0.00010557823
5,723	Evolution of a Compiling Query Engine	2021	VLDB	5.3522361e-05
7,098	Optimizing Queries over Partitioned Tables in MPP Systems	2014	SIGMOD	4.833012e-05
8,597	RLS Side Channels: Investigating Leakage of Row-Level Security Protected Data Through Query Execution Time	2023	SIGMOD	4.4879498e-05
8,598	Redundancy and Information Leakage in Fine-Grained Access Control	2006	SIGMOD	4.4879498e-05

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