Author
Ning Shang, Mohamed Nabeel, Federica Paci, Elisa Bertino
Abstract
We propose a novel scheme for selective distribution of content, encoded as documents, that
preserves the privacy of the users to whom the documents are delivered and is based on an efficient
and novel group key management scheme.
Our document broadcasting approach is based on access control policies specifying which users can
access which documents, or subdocuments. Based on such policies, a broadcast document is segmented
into multiple subdocuments, each encrypted with a different key. In line with modern attribute-based
access control, policies are specified against identity attributes of users. However our broadcasting
approach is privacy-preserving in that users are granted access to a specific document, or subdocument,
according to the policies without the need of providing in clear information about their identity attributes
to the document publisher. Under our approach, not only does the document publisher not learn the
values of the identity attributes of users, but it also does not learn which policy conditions are verified
by which users, thus inferences about the values of identity attributes are prevented. Moreover, our
key management scheme on which the proposed broadcasting approach is based is efficient in that it
does not require to send the decryption keys to the users along with the encrypted document. Users
are able to reconstruct the keys to decrypt the authorized portions of a document based on subscription
information they have received from the document publisher. The scheme also efficiently handles new
subscription of users and revocation of subscriptions. Please note that this is an improved and extended
version of our previous report [1].
