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A Hierarchical Key Assignment Scheme (HKAS) is a method to assign some private information and secret keys to a set of classes in a partially ordered hierarchy, so that the private information of a higher class together with some public information can be used to derive the keys of all classes lower down in the hierarchy. Historically, HKAS has been introduced to enforce multi-level access control, where it can be safely assumed that the public information is made available in some authenticated form. Subsequently, HKAS has found application in several other contexts where, instead, it would be convenient to certify the trustworthiness of public information. Such application contexts include key management for IoT and for emerging distributed data acquisition systems such as wireless sensor networks. In this paper, motivated by the need of accommodating this additional security requirement, we first introduce a new cryptographic primitive: Verifiable Hierarchical Key Assignment Scheme (VHKAS). A VHKAS is a key assignment scheme with a verification procedure that allows honest users to verify whether public information has been maliciously modified to induce an honest user to obtain an incorrect key. Then, we design and analyse VHKASs which are provably secure. Our solutions support key update for compromised secret keys by making a limited number of changes to public and private information.

Conference name: 31st Annual IFIP WG 11.3 Conference, DBSec 2017 Date of Conference: July 19-21, 2017 Trojan Horse attacks can lead to unauthorized data flows and can cause either a confidentiality violation or an integrity violation. Existing solutions to address this problem employ analysis techniques that keep track of all subject accesses to objects, and hence can be expensive. In this paper we show that for an unauthorized flow to exist in an access control matrix, a flow of length one must exist. Thus, to eliminate unauthorized flows, it is sufficient to remove all one-step flows, thereby avoiding the need for expensive transitive closure computations. This new insight allows us to develop an efficient methodology to identify and prevent all unauthorized flows leading to confidentiality and integrity violations. We develop separate solutions for two different environments that occur in real life, and experimentally validate the efficiency and restrictiveness of the proposed approaches using real data sets. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2017.

Cloud resources are increasingly pooled together for collaboration among users from different administrative units. In these settings, separation of duty between resource and identity management is strongly encouraged, as it streamlines organization of resource access in cloud. Yet, this separation may hinder availability and accessibility of resources, negating access to authorized and entitled subjects. In this paper, we present an in-depth analysis of group-reachability in user attribute-based access control. Starting from a concrete instance of an Access Control supported by the Azure platform, we adopt formal verification methods to demonstrate how it is possible to mitigate access availability issues, which may arise as per-attribute criteria groups are deployed.

Providing restrictive and secure access to resources is a challenging and socially important problem. Among the many formal security models, Role Based Access Control (RBAC) has become the norm in many of today's organizations for enforcing security. For every model, it is necessary to analyze and prove that the corresponding system is secure. Such analysis helps understand the implications of security policies and helps organizations gain confidence on the control they have on resources while providing access, and devise and maintain policies.In this paper, we consider security analysis for the Temporal RBAC (TRBAC), one of the extensions of RBAC. The TRBAC considered in this paper allows temporal restrictions on roles themselves, user-permission assignments (UA), permission-role assignments (PA), as well as role hierarchies (RH). Towards this end, we first propose a suitable administrative model that governs changes to temporal policies. Then we propose our security analysis strategy, that essentially decomposes the temporal security analysis problem into smaller and more manageable RBAC security analysis sub-problems for which the existing RBAC security analysis tools can be employed. We then evaluate them from a practical perspective by evaluating their performance using simulated data sets.

A time-bound hierarchical key assignment scheme is a method to assign time-dependent encryption keys to a set of classes in a partially ordered hierarchy, in such a way that each class can compute the keys of all classes lower down in the hierarchy, according to temporal constraints. In this paper we design and analyze time-bound hierarchical key assignment schemes which are provably-secure and efficient. We consider two different goals: security with respect to key indistinguishability and against key recovery. Moreover, we distinguish security against static and adaptive adversarial behaviors. We explore the relations between all possible combinations of security goals and adversarial behaviors and, in particular, we prove that security against adaptive adversaries is (polynomially) equivalent to security against static adversaries. Finally, we propose two different constructions for time-bound key assignment schemes. The first one is based on symmetric encryption schemes, whereas the second one makes use of bilinear maps. Both constructions support updates to the access hierarchy with local changes to the public information and without requiring any private information to be re-distributed.

In 1983, Akl and Taylor [Cryptographic solution to a problem of access control in a hierarchy, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 1 (3) (1983) 239–248] first suggested the use of cryptographic techniques to enforce access control in hierarchical structures. Due to its simplicity and versatility, the scheme has been used, for more than twenty years, to implement access control in several different domains, including mobile agent environments and XML documents. However, despite its use over time, the scheme has never been fully analyzed with respect to security and efficiency requirements. In this paper we provide new results on the Akl–Taylor scheme and its variants. More precisely: •We provide a rigorous analysis of the Akl–Taylor scheme. We consider different key assignment strategies and prove that the corresponding schemes are secure against key recovery.•We show how to obtain different tradeoffs between the amount of public information and the number of steps required to perform key derivation in the proposed schemes.•We also look at the MacKinnon et al. and Harn and Lin schemes and prove they are secure against key recovery.•We describe an Akl–Taylor based key assignment scheme with time-dependent constraints and prove the scheme efficient, flexible and secure.•We propose a general construction, which is of independent interest, yielding a key assignment scheme offering security w.r.t. key indistinguishability, given any key assignment scheme which guarantees security against key recovery.•Finally, we show how to use our construction, along with our assignment strategies and tradeoffs, to obtain an Akl–Taylor scheme, secure w.r.t. key indistinguishability, requiring a constant amount of public information.

Cryptographic access control offers selective accessto encrypted data via a combination of key management andfunctionality-rich cryptographic schemes, such as attribute-basedencryption. Using this approach, publicly available meta-datamay inadvertently leak information on the access policy that isenforced by cryptography, which renders cryptographic accesscontrol unusable in settings where this information is highlysensitive.We begin to address this problem by presenting rigorousdefinitions for policy privacy in cryptographic access control.For concreteness we set our results in the model of Role-BasedAccess Control (RBAC), where we identify and formalize severaldifferent flavors of privacy; however, our framework should serveas inspiration for other models of access control. Based on ourinsights we propose a new system which significantly improves onthe privacy properties of state-of-the-art constructions. Our designis based on a novel type of privacy-preserving attribute-basedencryption, which we introduce and show how to instantiate.We present our results in the context of a cryptographicRBAC system by Ferrara et al. (CSF’13), which uses cryptographyto control read access to files, while write access isstill delegated to trusted monitors. We give an extension of theconstruction that permits cryptographic control over write access.Our construction assumes that key management uses out-of-bandchannels between the policy enforcer and the users but eliminatescompletely the need for monitoring read/write access to the data.

A time-bound hierarchical key assignment scheme is a method to assign a cryptographic key to each class of users in a system organized as a partially ordered hierarchy, in such a way that key derivation is constrained both by class relationships and by time. Recently, a time-bound hierarchical key assignment scheme based on tamper-resistant devices and requiring low computational load and implementation cost has been proposed. Unfortunately, the scheme is not secure. In this paper we show how three malicious users can handle public and private information to misuse their tamper-resistant devices in order to compute some encryption keys that they should not be able to learn. We also show some countermeasures to withstand the weakness we have exploited.

In this paper we present Vac, an automatic tool for verifying security properties of administrative Role-based Access Control (RBAC). RBAC has become an increasingly popular access control model, particularly suitable for large organizations, and it is implemented in several software. Automatic security analysis of administrative RBAC systems is recognized as an important problem, as an analysis tool can help designers check whether their policies meet expected security properties. Vac converts administrative RBAC policies to imperative programs that simulate the policies both precisely and abstractly and supports several automatic verification back-ends to analyze the resulting programs. In this paper, we describe the architecture of Vac and overview the analysis techniques that have been implemented in the tool. We also report on experiments with several benchmarks from the literature.

Cryptographic access control promises to offer easily distributed trust and broader applicability, while reducing reliance on low-level online monitors. Traditional implementations of cryptographic access control rely on simple cryptographic primitives whereas recent endeavors employ primitives with richer functionality and security guarantees. Worryingly, few of the existing cryptographic access-control schemes come with precise guarantees, the gap between the policy specification and the implementation being analyzed only informally, if at all. In this paper we begin addressing this shortcoming. Unlike prior work that targeted ad-hoc policy specification, we look at the well-established Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) model, as used in a typical file system. In short, we provide a precise syntax for a computational version of RBAC, offer rigorous definitions for cryptographic policy enforcement of a large class of RBAC security policies, and demonstrate that an implementation based on attribute-based encryption meets our security notions. We view our main contribution as being at the conceptual level. Although we work with RBAC for concreteness, our general methodology could guide future research for uses of cryptography in other access-control models.

Current techniques for security analysis of administrative role-based access control (ARBAC) policies restrict themselves to the separate administration assumption that essentially separates administrative roles from regular ones. The naive algorithm of tracking all users is all that is known for the security analysis of ARBAC policies without separate administration, and the state space explosion that this results in precludes building effective tools. In contrast, the separate administration assumption greatly simplifies the analysis since it makes it sufficient to track only one user at a time. However, separation limits the expressiveness of the models and restricts modeling distributed administrative control. In this paper, we undertake a fundamental study of analysis of ARBAC policies without the separate administration restriction, and show that analysis algorithms can be built that track only a bounded number of users, where the bound depends only on the number of administrative roles in the system. Using this fundamental insight paves the way for us to design an involved heuristic to further tame the state space explosion in practical systems. Our results are also very effective when applied on policies designed under the separate administration restriction. We implement our techniques and report on experiments conducted on several realistic case studies.

A time-bound hierarchical key assignment scheme is a method to assign time-dependent encryption keys to a set of classes in a partially ordered hierarchy, in such a way that each class can compute the keys of all classes lower down in the hierarchy, according to temporal constraints. In this paper we consider the unconditionally secure setting for time-bound hierarchical key assignment schemes and distinguish between two different goals: security with respect to key indistinguishability and against key recovery. We first present definitions of security with respect to both goals; then, we prove a tight lower bound on the size of the private information distributed to each class; finally, we show an optimal construction for time-bound hierarchical key assignment schemes.

We propose a novel scheme for proving administrative role-based access control (ARBAC) policies correct with respect to security properties using the powerful abstraction based tools available for program verification. Our scheme uses a combination of abstraction and reduction to program verification to perform security analysis. We convert ARBAC policies to imperative programs that simulate the policy abstractly, and then utilize further abstract-interpretation techniques from program analysis to analyze the programs in order to prove the policies secure. We argue that the aggressive set-abstractions and numerical-abstractions we use are natural and appropriate in the access control setting. We implement our scheme using a tool called VAC that translates ARBAC policies to imperative programs followed by an interval-based static analysis of the program, and show that we can effectively prove access control policies correct. The salient feature of our approach are the abstraction schemes we develop and the reduction of role-based access control security (which has nothing to do with programs) to program verification problems.

Today, Role Based Access Control (RBAC) is the de facto model used for advanced access control, and is widely deployed in diverse enterprises of all sizes. Several extensions to the authorization as well as the administrative models for RBAC have been adopted in recent years. In this paper, we consider the temporal extension of RBAC (TRBAC), and develop safety analysis techniques for it. Safety analysis is essential for understanding the implications of security policies both at the stage of specification and modification. Towards this end, in this paper, we first define an administrative model for TRBAC. Our strategy for performing safety analysis is to appropriately decompose the TRBAC analysis problem into multiple subproblems similar to RBAC. Along with making the analysis simpler, this enables us to leverage and adapt existing analysis techniques developed for traditional RBAC. We have adapted and experimented with employing two state of the art analysis approaches developed for RBAC as well as tools developed for software testing. Our results show that our approach is both feasible and flexible.

A time-bound hierarchical key assignment scheme is a method to assign time-dependent encryption keys to a set of classes in a partially ordered hierarchy, in such a way that each class in the hierarchy can compute the keys of all classes lower down in the hierarchy, according to temporal constraints.In this paper we propose new constructions for time-bound hierarchical key assignment schemes which are provably secure with respect to key indistinguishability. Our constructions use as a building block any provably-secure hierarchical key assignment scheme without temporal constraints and exhibit a tradeoff among the amount of private information held by each class, the amount of public data, the complexity of key derivation, and the computational assumption on which their security is based. Moreover, the proposed schemes support updates to the access hierarchy with local changes to public information and without requiring any private information to be re-distributed.

In this paper we propose an information-theoretic approach to the access control problem in a scenario where a group of users is divided into a number of disjoint classes. The set of rules that specify the information flow between different user classes in the system defines an access control policy. An access control policy can be implemented by using a key assignment scheme, where a trusted central authority (CA) assigns an encryption key and some private information to each class.We consider key assignment schemes where the key assigned to each class is unconditionally secure with respect to an adversary controlling a coalition of classes of a limited size. Our schemes are characterized by a security parameter r, the size of the adversary coalition. We show lower bounds on the size of the private information that each class has to store and on the amount of randomness needed by the CA to set up any key assignment scheme. Finally, we propose some optimal constructions for unconditionally secure key assignment schemes.

The access control problem deals with the management of sensitive information among a number of users who are classified according to their suitability in accessing the information in a computer system. The set of rules that specify the information flow between different user classes in the system defines an access control policy. Akl and Taylor first considered the access control problem in a system organized as a partially ordered hierarchy. They proposed a cryptographic key assignment scheme, where each class is assigned an encryption key that can be used, along with some public parameters generated by a central authority, to compute the key assigned to any class lower down in the hierarchy. Subsequently, many researchers have proposed schemes that either have better performances or allow insertion and deletion of classes in the hierarchy.In this paper we show how to construct a cryptographic key assignment scheme for any arbitrary access control policy. Our construction uses as a building block a cryptographic key assignment scheme for partially ordered hierarchies. The security of our scheme holds with respect to adversaries of limited computing power and directly derives from the security of the underlying scheme for partially ordered hierarchies. Moreover, the size of the keys assigned to classes in our scheme is exactly the same as in the underlying scheme.

A hierarchical key assignment scheme is a method to assign some private information and encryption keys to a set of classes in a partially ordered hierarchy, in such a way that the private information of a higher class can be used to derive the keys of all classes lower down in the hierarchy.In this paper we design and analyze hierarchical key assignment schemes which are provably secure and support dynamic updates to the hierarchy with local changes to the public information and without requiring any private information to be re-distributed. –We first consider the problem of constructing a hierarchical key assignment scheme by using as a building block a symmetric encryption scheme. We propose a new construction which is provably secure with respect to key indistinguishability, requires a single computational assumption, and improves on previous proposals.–Then, we show how to construct a hierarchical key assignment scheme by using as a building block a public-key broadcast encryption scheme. In particular, one of our constructions provides constant private information and public information linear in the number of classes in the hierarchy.

In this paper we propose an information-theoretic approach to the access control problem in a scenario where a group of users is divided into a number of disjoint classes. The set of rules that specify the information flow between different user classes in the system defines an access control policy. An access control policy can be implemented by using a key assignment scheme, where a trusted central authority (CA) assigns an encryption key and some private information to each class. We consider key assignment schemes which are unconditionally secure against attacks carried out by any coalition of classes. We show lower bounds on the size of the private information that each class has to store and on the amount of randomness needed by the CA to set up any key assignment scheme. Finally, we propose an optimal construction for unconditionally secure key assignment schemes.