An Efficient Solution for Hierarchical Access Control Problem in Cloud Environment

Abstract

The time‐bound hierarchical key assignment scheme provides a cryptographic solution for the access control problem in distributed systems (e.g., Pay‐TV and cloud computing applications). Most time‐bound hierarchical key assignment schemes can be divided into two types: adopting tamper‐resistant devices and utilizing public values. Despite the fact that adopting tamper‐resistant devices can easily resist to collusion attacks, utilizing public values is much cheaper and more suitable for cloud environment. In this paper, we proposed a new time‐bound hierarchical key assignment scheme, which can effectively defeat the collusion attack. Besides, the proposed scheme utilizes public values instead of tamper‐resistant devices, which will restrict user’s convenience. Compared with the previous works, our scheme requires fewer public values and has better performance.