Towards Pervasive Cryptographic Access Control Models

Access control lies at the heart of any technical information security and information assurance system. Access control is traditionally enforced by reference monitors, which are assumed to be able to reliably monitor and mediate all traffic from users to objects. An alternative view to enforcement is cryptography, referred to as cryptographic access control (CAC). CAC has gained popularity with the emergence of distributed computing, especially cloud computing and “everything as a service”. CAC is not a formal model, but an enforcement paradigm. In this paper we propose an extension to the current CAC framework and discuss the limits, where it is in general feasible to extend CAC as a paradigm over reference monitors.