An Efficient and Expressive Access Control Architecture for Content-Based Networks

Tactical content-based networks provide high military utility in dynamic mobile networks with intermittent connectivity and inherent disruption. Protecting the confidentiality of information exchanges (content and metadata) in such networks is particularly challenging since the publisher of information does not know who the subscribers are, yet the publisher wants fine-grained control over who has access to the information. Cipher text Policy Attribute Based Encryption (CP-ABE) is a widely accepted cryptographic solution to this 1-many access control problem. This paper presents an efficient and expressive access control architecture for content-based networks based on CP-ABE. A key contribution of the paper is the efficiency of the proposed cryptographic solution which makes it practical in a resource constrained tactical network. We demonstrate our secure and efficient solution over a state-of-the-art tactical content based network, and we quantify its performance overhead.