Cryptographic Role-Based Security Mechanisms Based on Role-Key Hierarchy

Even though Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) can tremendously help one minimize the complexity in administering users, it is still needed to realize the notion of roles at the resource level. In this paper, the authors propose a practical cryptographic RBAC model, called role-key hierarchy model, to support various security features including signature, identification and encryption based on role-key hierarchy. With the help of rich algebraic structure of elliptic curve, they introduce a role-based cryptosystem construction to verify the rationality and validity of the proposed model.