Safe data sharing and data dissemination on smart devices

The erosion of trust put in traditional database servers and in Database Service Providers (DSP), the growing interest for different forms of data dissemination and the concern for protecting children from suspicious Internet content are different factors that lead to move the access control from servers to clients. Due to the intrinsic untrustworthiness of client devices, client-based access control solutions rely on data encryption. The data are kept encrypted at the server and a client is granted access to subparts of them according to the decryption keys in its possession. Several variations of this basic model have been proposed (e.g., [1, 6]) but they have in common to minimize the trust required on the client at the cost of a static way of sharing data. Indeed, whatever the granularity of sharing, the dataset is split in subsets reflecting a current sharing situation, each encrypted with a different key. Once the dataset is encrypted, changes in the access control rules definition may impact the subset boundaries, hence incurring a partial re-encryption of the dataset and a potential redistribution of keys.