Tolerant Key Assignment for Enforcing Complicated Access Control Policies in a Hierarchy

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Chang, Ya-Fen | Chang, Chin-Chen

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taichung Institute of Technology, Taichung, Taiwan, 404, R.O.C. E-mail: [email protected] | Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Feng Chia University, Taichung, Taiwan, 40724, R.O.C. E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract: In 1998, Yeh et al. proposed a flexible key assignment scheme for enforcing complicated access control policies in a user matrix model. Later, Hwang indicated that Yeh et al.' scheme is susceptible to some security flaws. Thus, Lin et al. proposed a key assignment scheme for enforcing complicated access control policies in a hierarchy. However, there exist drawbacks in Lin et al.'s scheme: lack of efficiency and a large variation of the keys. Hence, we propose an efficient key assignment scheme in a hierarchy for enforcing the complicated access control policies. What is more, the secret key of one class is allowed to be changed several times without influencing the derivation key in our proposed scheme.

Keywords: key assignment, hierarchy, access control

Journal: Fundamenta Informaticae, vol. 76, no. 1-2, pp. 13-23, 2007