Classical examples of security policies for information flow are the well known Bell-Lapadula [BL73] or Biba [Bib75] model: in a nutshell, the Bell-Lapadula model assigns roles to every user in the system (e.g., public, secret and top-secret). A users' role specifies which messages the user is allowed to receive (i.e., the no read-up rule, meaning that users with public clearance should not be able to read messages marked as secret or top-secret) but also which messages the user is allowed to send (i.e., the no write-down rule, meaning that a user with top-secret clearance should not be able to write messages marked as secret or public).
To the best of our knowledge, no existing cryptographic primitive allows for even this simple form of access control, since no existing cryptographic primitive enforces any restriction on what kind of messages one should be able to encrypt.
Our contributions are: - Introducing and formally defining access control encryption (ACE); - A construction of ACE with complexity linear in the number of the roles based on classic number theoretic assumptions (DDH, Paillier); - A construction of ACE with complexity polylogarithmic in the number of roles based on recent results on cryptographic obfuscation;
Category / Keywords: public-key cryptography / access control Date: received 9 Feb 2016, last revised 23 Nov 2016 Contact author: orlandi at cs au dk; haagh@cs au dk Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation Note: Updated full version of the paper Version: 20161123:110903 (All versions of this report) Short URL: ia.cr/2016/106 Discussion forum: Show discussion | Start new discussion