A flexible hierarchical access control mechanism enforcing extension policies

Abstract

Some specific information or resources only can be accessed by authorized users. Discretionary access control (DAC), mandatory access control (MAC), and role‐based access control (RBAC) are three main classes of access control policies. MAC and RBAC are more secure than discretionary access control because a system instead of an object's owner determines the policy. MAC is appropriate for multilevel applications with high security requirements such as military ones, while RBAC provides security and business benefits. Most institutions, companies, and governments are multilevel, so relationships between roles or security levels tend to be hierarchical. In this work, an access control mechanism, providing explicit transitive exception and antisymmetric arrangement, is proposed to provide flexible and appropriate solutions to hierarchical relationships. For practicability, no access control policy is strictly constrained in the proposed mechanism such that security classes can be determined according to specific requirements. The proposed mechanism employs an elliptic curve cryptosystem and a two‐layer hash approach to ensure security and computation efficiency. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Extended hierarchical key assignment scheme (E-HKAS): how to efficiently enforce explicit policy exceptions in dynamic hierarchies

“…It allows the data owner to temporarily delegate decryption rights of a security class SC i to another security class SC j in such a way that SC j can access data encrypted directly for SC i but cannot access data encrypted for any of SC i 's descendant security classes. For example in figure 1, class delegation with descendant(s) safety from SC 6 to SC 2 means that data intended directly for SC 6 is accessible to SC 2 and SC 1 . However, data intended for SC 7 is accessible to neither SC 2 nor SC 1 .…”

“…However, their scheme [5] requires Oðn 2 Þ public storage and features inefficient dynamic update operations, which require public parameters corresponding to all ancestors as well as all descendants of the affected security class to be updated by the data owner. In 2015, Chang [6] proposed another flexible HKAS with the same motivation of enforcing explicit transitive and anti-symmetric exceptions in a traditional access hierarchy. The scheme in [6] uses ECC and efficient one-way hash functions to achieve constant key derivation cost.…”

“…In 2015, Chang [6] proposed another flexible HKAS with the same motivation of enforcing explicit transitive and anti-symmetric exceptions in a traditional access hierarchy. The scheme in [6] uses ECC and efficient one-way hash functions to achieve constant key derivation cost. However, storage cost of implementing the scheme is Oðn 2 Þ for a hierarchy of n classes.…”

“…In practical application scenarios, explicit policy exceptions may be desired in the hierarchy by either extending the access rights of a security class or by revoking their designated access to some data items or both. These explicit policy exceptions include transitive exception and anti-symmetric exception [5,6]. In transitive exception, SC i can access SC j and SC j can access SC k but SC i cannot access SC k .…”

Universally Composable Cryptographic Role-Based Access Control

“…Much of the prior work in this area was concerned with designing access control systems from basic cryptographic primitives [18,15,2,11,10,9,8] and/or designing new primitives tailored for the problem of access control [17,23,24,14]. For the most part, the security of cryptographic access control systems was only heuristically studied.…”