McDermott, J. and S. Jajodia, "Orange Locking: Channel-Free Database Concurrency Control via Locking", in Database Security VI: Status and Prospects, eds. B. Thuraisingham and C. Landwehr, North-Holland, 1993, pp. 267-284.
The concurrency control lock (e.g. file lock, table lock) has long been used as a canonical example of a covert channel in a database system. Locking is a fundamental concurrency control technique used in many kinds of computer systems beside database systems. Locking is generally considered to be interfering and hence unsuitable for multilevel systems. In this paper we show how such locks can be used for concurrency control, without introducing covert channels.