Secure Group Communication Based Scheme for Differential Access Control in Dynamic Environments

Applications like e-newspaper or interactive online gaming typically have more than one resource and a large number of users. There is a many-to-many relationship between users and resources, each user can access multiple resources and each resource can be accessed by multiple users. Each resource needs to be encrypted by a different Resource Encryption Key (REK). Each REK needs to be distributed to all subscribers of the Resource and each subscriber must get all the REKs he/she subscribes to. We term this as problem of Differential Access Control. Also this environment is very dynamic in terms of subscription changes by users and resource changes by service providers. Conventional ways of Access Control are not sufficient for this problem of Differential Access Control. In this paper, we propose a new scheme of Access Control, based on Secure Group Communication framework, that is efficient, scalable,practical and dynamic.