Access Control Encryption: Enforcing Information Flow with Cryptography

We initiate the study of Access Control Encryption (ACE), a novel cryptographic primitive that allows fine-grained access control, by giving different rights to different users not only in terms of which messages they are allowed to receive, but also which messages they are allowed to send. Classical examples of security policies for information flow are the well known Bell-Lapadula [BL73] or Biba [Bib75] model: in a nutshell, the Bell-Lapadula model assigns roles to every user in the system (e.g., public, secret and top-secret). A users’ role specifies which messages the user is allowed to receive (i.e., the no read-up rule, meaning that users with public clearance should not be able to read messages marked as secret or top-secret) but also which messages the user is allowed to send (i.e., the no writedown rule, meaning that a user with top-secret clearance should not be able to write messages marked as secret or public). To the best of our knowledge, no existing cryptographic ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: IACR
• Authors: Ivan Damgård, Helene Haagh, Claudio Orlandi
• Keywords: Biometrics, IACR 2016