Patent ID: 7698441

Claim:
A method of providing security with respect to data, comprising: generating at least one security list comprising an entry for each field of the data having an associated security rule; for a given user, generating a user specific instance of the at least one security list, the generating comprising: a) for each field of each entry in the security list, determining whether data exists for the field that is specific to the given user; and b) if not, removing the entry from the security list; after generating the user specific instance of the at least one security list, receiving a query issued against a database by the given user, wherein the query is configured with at least one field and an associated value for the at least one field; accessing the security list to determine whether the security list contains an entry corresponding to the at least one field of the query; and if the security list contains an entry corresponding to the at least one field of the query, enforcing a security rule associated with the at least one field; whereby security rules specified for fields in queries are enforced based upon the existence of data specific to the user for the fields.