Context-Related Access Control for Mobile Caching

Abstract

Mobile caching is a popular technique that has been widely applied in mobile applications to reduce the bandwidth usage, battery consumption, and perceived lag. To protect the confidentiality of cached data, the data with sensitive information has to be encrypted as it is cached on mobile devices. Currently, several mobile platforms provide encryption utilities which allow mobile applications to encrypt their local caches. However, existing encryption utilities are too coarse-grained and not directly applicable to dynamically enforcing fine-grained context-related access control policies in context-aware mobile applications.In this paper, we first show the necessity of new encryption schemes in context-aware mobile applications by examples, and then propose three encryption schemes for enforcing context-related access control policies on cached data. The proposed encryption schemes adopt different cryptographic techniques. By comparing the cache hit rate and communication gain, we analyze the impact of applying the proposed schemes to the efficiency of the existing mobile cache management algorithm in context-aware mobile applications. Further, we evaluate the performance of these schemes through extensive simulations, and suggest the suitable application scenarios for each scheme.