This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th VLDB Workshop on Secure Data Management, SDM 2008, held in Auckland, New Zealand, on August 24, 2008, in conjunction with VLDB 2008.<BR>The 11 revised full papers presented together with a keynote paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 32 submissions for publication in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on database security, trust management, privacy protection, and security and privacy in healthcare. The volume is rounded off by 3 position papers whose topics range from data disclosure control, via privacy protection to access control.