Role Signatures for Access Control in Open Distributed Systems

Implementing access control efficiently and effectively in an open and distributed system is a challenging problem. One reason for this is that users requesting access to remote resources may be unknown to the authorization service that controls access to the requested resources. Hence, it seems inevitable that predefined mappings of principals in one domain to those in the domain containing the resources are needed. In addition, verifying the authenticity of user credentials or attributes can be difficult. In this paper, we propose the concept of role signatures to solve these problems by exploiting the hierarchical namespaces that exist in many distributed systems. Our approach makes use of a hierarchical identity-based signature scheme: verification keys are based on generic role identifiers defined within a hierarchical namespace. The verification of a role signature serves to prove that the signer is an authorized user and is assigned to one or more roles. Individual member organi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: SEC
• Authors: Jason Crampton, Hoon Wei Lim
• Keywords: Access Control, Hierarchical Namespace, Role Signature, SEC 2008, Security Privacy