P-Hera: Scalable fine-grained access control for P2P infrastructures

Abstract

In this paper, we present P-Hera, a peer-to-peer (P2P) infrastructure for scalable and secure content hosting. P-Hera allows the users and content owners to dynamically establish trust using fine-grained access control. In P-Hera, resource owners can specify fine-grained restrictions on who can access their resources and which user can access which part of data. We differentiate our work with traditional works of fine-grained access control on Web services, as our system in addition to handling access constraints of the service provider (which is the case in Web services), it also handles security constraints regarding actions performed on data: replication and modification. We believe this is of immense significance for wide-range of applications such as data grids, information grids and Web content delivery networks. In addition to presenting the overall system architecture, we also study the problem of evaluating these fine-grained access policies in depth and propose a novel means of organizing these policies that can result in faster evaluation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using prototype implementation.