An Inner Product Space-Based Hierarchical Key Assignment Scheme for
Access Control
Abstract
An inner product space-based hierarchical key assignment/access control
scheme is presented in this work. The proposed scheme can be utilized in
any cloud delivery model where the data controller implements a
hierarchical access control policy. In other words, the scheme adjusts
any hierarchical access control policy to a digital medium. The scheme
is based on inner product spaces and the method of orthogonal
projection. While distributing a basis for each class by the data
controller, the left-to-right and bottom-up policy can provide much more
flexibility and efficiency, especially during any dynamic update/change
in the hierarchical structure. For each class, the secret keys can be
derived only when a predetermined subspace is available. A parent class
can obtain the secret keys of its child classes, which means a one-way
function, and the opposite direction is not allowed. Our scheme is
collusion attack and privilege creep problem resistant, as well as key
recovery and indistinguishability secure. The performance analysis shows
that the data storage overhead is more tolerable than other schemes in
the literature. In addition, the other advantage of our scheme over many
others in the literature is that it needs only one operation for the
derivation of the secret key of child classes.