Protecting documents with sticky policies and identity-based encryption

Cloud-based systems are increasing being used to store sensitive documents, but which increasingly exposes them to the access from malicious entities. A major problem with this is that it is often difficult to apply access control policies which can be scaled into the Cloud. Along with this, modern cryptography methods tend to encrypt and control access to complete documents, and where, increasingly we need to control access to parts of a document. This paper outlines the integration of sticky policies that are embedded into OOXML (Open Office XML) and which protects each individual element of a data entity rather than the entire document, and without content granular access control. Finally it combines with modern public key Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) scheme to securely attach the sticky policy onto data.