Pace: Privacy-Protection for Access Control Enforcement in P2P Networks

In open environments such as peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, the decision to collaborate with multiple users - e.g., by granting access to a resource - is hard to achieve in practice due to extreme decentralization and the lack of trusted third parties. The literature contains a plethora of applications in which a scalable solution for distributed access control is crucial. This fact motivates us to propose a protocol to enforce access control, applicable to networks consisting entirely of untrusted nodes. The main feature of our protocol is that it protects both sensitive permissions and sensitive policies, and does not rely on any centralized authority. We analyze the efficiency (computational effort and communication overhead) as well as the security of our protocol.