Distributed access control: a privacy-conscious approach

With more and more information being exchanged or published on the Web or in peer-to-peer, and with the significant growth in numbers of distributed, heterogeneous data sources, issues like access control and data privacy are becoming increasingly complex and difficult to manage. Very often, when dealing with sensitive information in such settings, the specification of access control policies and their enforcement are no longer handled by the actual data sources, and are (partially) delegated to third-parties. Besides practical reasons, this is the case when decisions regarding access depend on factors which overpass the scope and knowledge of some of the entities involved. More specifically, policies may depend on private aspects concerning users (accessing data) or data owners. In this case, the only solution is to entrust some third-party authority with all the information needed to apply access policies. However, as the policies themselves depend on sensitive information, this outsourcing raises new privacy issues, that were not present in centralized environments. In particular, information leaks may occur during access control enforcement. In this paper, we consider these issues and, starting from non-conventional digital signatures, we take a first step towards an implementation solution for such settings where both data and access policies are distributed. Our approach involves rewriting user queries into forms which are authorized, and we illustrate this for both structured (relational) and semi-structured (XML) data and queries.