Cryptographic Enforcement of Role-Based Access Control

Many cryptographic schemes have been designed to enforce information flow policies. However, enterprise security requirements are often better encoded, or can only be encoded, using role-based access control policies rather than information flow policies. In this paper, we provide an alternative formulation of role-based access control that enables us to apply existing cryptographic schemes to core and hierarchical role-based access control policies. We then show that special cases of our cryptographic enforcement schemes for role-based access control are equivalent to cryptographic enforcement schemes for temporal access control and to ciphertext-policy and key-policy attribute-based encryption schemes. Finally, we describe how these special cases can be extended to support richer forms of temporal access control and attribute-based encryption.