An Effective Key Management Approach to Differential Access Control in Dynamic Environments

Abstract

Applications like e-newspaper or interactive online gaming have more than one resource and a large number of users. There is a many-to-many relationship between users and resources; each user can access multiple resources and multiple users can access each resource. The resources are independent and each resource needs to be encrypted by a different Resource Encryption Key (REK). Each REK needs to be distributed to all subscribers of the resource and each subscriber must get all the REKs he/she subscribes to. Also this environment is very dynamic in terms of subscription changes by users and resource changes by service providers. We term this as the problem of key management for Differential Access Control (DIF-AC) in dynamic environments. Conventional ways of access control are not sufficient for this problem of DIF-AC key management. In this study we propose a novel approach of keys management to enforce DIF-AC in highly dynamic environments, based on Secure Group Communication framework.