Dynamic and efficient key management for access hierarchies

Abstract

The problem of key management in an access hierarchy has elicited much interest in the literature. The hierarchy is modeled as a set of partially ordered classes (represented as a directed graph), and a user who obtains access (i.e., a key) to a certain class can also obtain access to all descendant classes of her class through key derivation. Our solution to the above problem has the following properties: (i) only hash functions are used for a node to derive a descendant's key from its own key; (ii) the space complexity of the public information is the same as that of storing the hierarchy; (iii) the private information at a class consists of a single key associated with that class; (iv) updates (revocations, additions, etc.) are handled locally in the hierarchy; (v) the scheme is provably secure against collusion; and (vi) key derivation by a node of its descendant's key is bounded by the number of bit operations linear in the length of the path between the nodes. Whereas many previous schemes had some of these properties, ours is the first that satisfies all of them. Moreover, for trees (and other recursively decomposable hierarchies), we are the first to achieve a worst- and average-case number of bit operations for key derivation that is exponentially better than the of a balanced hierarchy (double-exponentially better if the hierarchy is unbalanced, i.e., tall and skinny); this is achieved with only a constant increase in the space for the hierarchy. We also show how with simple modifications our scheme can handle extensions proposed by Crampton of the standard hierarchies to limited depth and reverse inheritance [13]. The security of our scheme relies only on the use of pseudo-random functions.