Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 1996/008

Access Control and Signatures via Quorum Secret Sharing

Moni Naor and Avishai Wool

Abstract: We suggest a method of controlling the access to a secure database via quorum systems. A quorum system is a collection of sets (quorums) every two of which have a nonempty intersection. Quorum systems have been used for a number of applications in the area of distributed systems. We propose a separation between access servers which are protected and trustworthy, but may be outdated, and the data servers which may all be compromised. The main paradigm is that only the servers in a complete quorum can collectively grant (or revoke) access permission. The method we suggest ensures that after authorization is revoked, a cheating user Alice will not be able to access the data even if many access servers still consider her authorized, and even if the complete raw database is available to her. The method has a low overhead in terms of communication and computation. It can also be converted into a distributed system for issuing secure signatures.

Category / Keywords: Quorum Systems, Replication, Signatures, Access Control, Secret Sharing

Publication Info: Appeared in the THEORY OF CRYPTOGRAPHY LIBRARY and has been included in the ePrint Archive. An extended abstract of this paper appeared in the 3rd ACM Conf. Computer and Communication Security, 1996.

Date: received July 2nd, 1996.

Contact author: yash at wisdom weizmann ac il

Available format(s): Postscript (PS) | Compressed Postscript (PS.GZ) | BibTeX Citation

Short URL: ia.cr/1996/008

Discussion forum: Show discussion | Start new discussion