Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2013/277

ESPOON: Enforcing Encrypted Security Policies in Outsourced Environments

Muhammad Rizwan Asghar and Mihaela Ion and Giovanni Russello and Bruno Crispo

Abstract: The enforcement of security policies in outsourced environments is still an open challenge for policy-based systems. On the one hand, taking the appropriate security decision requires access to the policies. However, if such access is allowed in an untrusted environment then confidential information might be leaked by the policies. Current solutions are based on cryptographic operations that embed security policies with the security mechanism. Therefore, the enforcement of such policies is performed by allowing the authorised parties to access the appropriate keys. We believe that such solutions are far too rigid because they strictly intertwine authorisation policies with the enforcing mechanism.

In this paper, we want to address the issue of enforcing security policies in an untrusted environment while protecting the policy confidentiality. Our solution ESPOON is aiming at providing a clear separation between security policies and the enforcement mechanism. However, the enforcement mechanism should learn as less as possible about both the policies and the requester attributes.

Category / Keywords: applications / Encrypted Policies, Sensitive Policy Evaluation, Data Outsourcing, Cloud Computing, Privacy, Security

Publication Info: The final version of this paper has been published at ARES 2011

Date: received 13 May 2013

Contact author: asghar at disi unitn it

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20130516:130734 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2013/277

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