Title
A Framework for the Cryptographic Enforcement of Information Flow Policies
Abstract
It is increasingly common to outsource data storage to untrusted, third party (e.g. cloud) servers. However, in such settings, low-level online reference monitors may not be appropriate for enforcing read access, and thus cryptographic enforcement schemes (CESs) may be required. Much of the research on cryptographic access control has focused on the use of specific primitives and, primarily, on how to generate appropriate keys and fails to model the access control system as a whole. Recent work in the context of role-based access control has shown a gap between theoretical policy specification and computationally secure implementations of access control policies, potentially leading to insecure implementations. Without a formal model, it is hard to (i) reason about the correctness and security of a CES, and (ii) show that the security properties of a particular cryptographic primitive are sufficient to guarantee security of the CES as a whole. In this paper, we provide a rigorous definitional framework for a CES that enforces read-only information flow policies (which encompass many practical forms of access control, including role-based policies). This framework (i) provides a tool by which instantiations of CESs can be proven correct and secure, (ii) is independent of any particular cryptographic primitives used to instantiate a CES, and (iii) helps to identify the limitations of current primitives (e.g. key assignment schemes) as components of a CES.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1145/3078861.3078868
SACMAT
Keywords
Field
DocType
Cryptographic Enforcement Scheme, Information Flow Policy, Access Control, Cryptography, Key Assignment Scheme, Attribute-based Encryption
Information flow (information theory),Cryptographic protocol,Cryptography,Computer security,Computer science,Attribute-based encryption,Correctness,Cryptographic primitive,Controlled Cryptographic Item,Access control,Distributed computing
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-4702-0
0
0.34
References 
Authors
15
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
James Alderman142.43
Jason Crampton2107768.52
Naomi Farley331.75