An Efficient Solution for Hierarchical Access Control Problem in Cloud Environment

Bing-Zhe He,Chien-Ming Chen,Tsu-Yang Wu,Hung-Min Sun

doi:10.1155/2014/569397

Abstract

The time-bound hierarchical key assignment scheme provides a cryptographic solution for the access control problem in distributed systems (e.g., Pay-TV and cloud computing applications). Most time-bound hierarchical key assignment schemes can be divided into two types: adopting tamper-resistant devices and utilizing public values. Despite the fact that adopting tamper-resistant devices can easily resist to collusion attacks, utilizing public values is much cheaper and more suitable for cloud environment. In this paper, we proposed a new time-bound hierarchical key assignment scheme, which can effectively defeat the collusion attack. Besides, the proposed scheme utilizes public values instead of tamper-resistant devices, which will restrict user’s convenience. Compared with the previous works, our scheme requires fewer public values and has better performance.

Highlights

The access control problem refers to control who can access the resources in a system
Suppose that the administrator belongs to the manager class and normal users belong to the user class
The members in the manager class can access the resources in the user class, but normal user cannot access the resources of manager class

Summary

Introduction

The access control problem refers to control who can access the resources in a system. The key assignment scheme needs to consider the partial-order hierarchy and the key update problem when a user leaves the class. The time-bound hierarchical key assignment protocol is proposed for the above problem. Since the encrypting key has the time-bound property, we do not need to consider the key update problem when a Mathematical Problems in Engineering user leaves the class. The time-bound key assignment protocols can be divided into two types: one is based on tamper-resistant devices ([6, 7]) and the other is based on public values. We propose a time-bound hierarchical key assignment scheme which is based on a bilinear pairing function. Compared to the previous works, the proposed scheme has few numbers of the public values and does not need the special requirement for constructing partial-order hierarchy.

Related Work

Preliminaries

The Proposed Scheme

Analysis

Conclusion