Hiding the policy in cryptographic access control

  • Authors:
  • Sascha Müller;Stefan Katzenbeisser

  • Affiliations:
  • Security Engineering Group, Technische Universität Darmstadt &, Center for Advanced Security Research Darmstadt (CASED), Germany;Security Engineering Group, Technische Universität Darmstadt &, Center for Advanced Security Research Darmstadt (CASED), Germany

  • Venue:
  • STM'11 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Security and Trust Management
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Recently, cryptographic access control has received a lot of attention, mainly due to the availability of efficient Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) schemes. ABE allows to get rid of a trusted reference monitor by enforcing access rules in a cryptographic way. However, ABE has a privacy problem: The access policies are sent in clear along with the ciphertexts. Further generalizing the idea of policy-hiding in cryptographic access control, we introduce policy anonymity where --- similar to the well-understood concept of k -anonymity --- the attacker can only see a large set of possible policies that might have been used to encrypt, but is not able to identify the one that was actually used. We show that using a concept from graph theory we can extend a known ABE construction to achieve the desired privacy property.