ABAC-PA2: Attribute-Based Access Control Model with Privacy aware Anonymous Access

Abstract

Cloud computing offers an excellent platform for sharing information and services among departments, partners, customers, and other parties. To ensure the effectiveness of a cloud deployment, it is imperative that resources and data are available in a secure and efficient manner. The protection of personally identifiable information (PII) is a critical requirement for many organizations in order to prevent unauthorized disclosure of that information. In spite of the fact that private information may not be stored within an authorized organization, it can still be protected. It has been shown in recent literature that anonymity can be used to preserve PII privacy. The current methodology for anonymous access is based on certificates rather than subject identity or attribute-based encryption. Identity-based access control is inflexible and violates privacy laws. Access to a certificate can be linked using a certificate that poses a risk of re-identification. The types of objects that can be encrypted by attributes are limited.To preserve the privacy of attributes set of subject and object, we extend the attribute-based access control (ABAC) model by expressing privacy requirements with anonymous access. It inherits several characteristics from ABAC, including fine-grained authorizations, unlimited object types, policy flexibility, and object privacy. ABAC-PA2 uses homomorphic attribute-based signature (HABS), a secure anonymous access framework that enhances ABAC's identity-less and incorporates privacy-preserving principles by assigning privacy levels to resources.