Practical and efficient cryptographic enforcement of interval-based access control policies

The enforcement of access control policies using cryptography has received considerable attention in recent years and the security of such enforcement schemes is increasingly well understood. Recent work in the area has considered the efficient enforcement of temporal and geo-spatial access control policies, and asymptotic results for the time and space complexity of efficient enforcement schemes have been obtained. However, for practical purposes, it is useful to have explicit bounds for the complexity of enforcement schemes. In this article we consider interval-based access control policies, of which temporal and geo-spatial access control policies are special cases. We define enforcement schemes for interval-based access control policies for which it is possible, in almost all cases, to obtain exact values for the schemes' complexity, thereby subsuming a substantial body of work in the literature. Moreover, our enforcement schemes are more practical than existing schemes, in the sense that they operate in the same way as standard cryptographic enforcement schemes, unlike other efficient schemes in the literature. The main difference between our approach and earlier work is that we develop techniques that are specific to the cryptographic enforcement of interval-based access control policies, rather than applying generic techniques that give rise to complex constructions and asymptotic bounds.