An efficient key management scheme for content access control for linear hierarchies

Abstract

The content access control problem appears in any context with a set of users and resources. The difference in access rights of the users defines classes where members of a given class have exactly the same access rights. A hierarchy can be defined on the classes. Linear hierarchies constitute a particulary interesting type of hierarchies. They appear in a wide range of applications such as secure multi-layered data streaming and communications within security corps. Many proposals have dealt with key management issues for tree hierarchies but they result in unjustified overhead when applied to linear hierarchies. In this paper, we discuss the general problem of content access control in a hierarchy (CACH). Thereafter, we present the main requirements in key management to ensure confidentiality in linear hierarchies. In particular, we define a model to make a uniform and coherent description of the existing key management schemes. Thereafter, we propose an efficient key management scheme for linear hierarchies that not only provides mechanisms to manage membership changes but also hierarchy shape changes, and we describe it using our model. We conduct intensive simulations which show that our solution scales very well in terms of storage, bandwidth, and computation. Finally, we determine the complexity of some well-known key management schemes and compare them to the complexity of our scheme. This comparison shows that our scheme offers efficient compromises in complexity and overall overheads.

A Higher-Level Security Scheme for Key Access on Cloud Computing

“…In 2011, De Santis et al [36] and in 2012, Hassen et al [37] proposed their schemes with better performance than the previous ones. The schemes [36] (TBEBF:time-bound encryption-based family and TBBEBF:time-bound broadcast encryption-based family) support dynamic updates in the hierarchy at the expense of an increase in the amount of public information.…”

An Inner Product Space-Based Hierarchical Key Assignment Scheme for Access Control

“…In 2011, De Santis et al [30], and in 2012, Hassen et al [31] proposed their schemes with better performance than the previous ones. The schemes in [30] (TBEBF:timebound encryption-based family and TBBEBF:time-bound broadcast encryption-based family) support dynamic updates in the hierarchy without the need of redistribution of private information but at the expense of an increase in the amount of public information.…”

“…The scheme's private key storage requirement is small as it needs only one key per class, but the amount of public storage need grows linearly with the number of classes and edges in the graph. On the other hand, the scheme in [31] has very competitive storage, bandwidth, and computation overheads in comparison with previous ones.…”

“…There are two types of hierarchical key assignment schemes; indirect access schemes and direct access schemes. In indirect access schemes such as [23], [30], [31], the secret key of the child class can be derived from it by calculating all keys on the path to the child class. In direct access schemes such as [22], [25], [29], [32], it only requires one computational task to derive the secret key of the child class.…”

Analyses of several recently proposed group key management schemes

“…Thus, we suggest that designers use other ways to represent the level‐based access relations. We would like to refer readers to Hassen's research paper , which uses linear model as shown in Figure . He proposed a hybrid scheme that is very simple, effective, and secure.…”