ESPOON: Enforcing Encrypted Security Policies in Outsourced Environments

TL;DR

ESPOON introduces a method for enforcing security policies in untrusted outsourced environments by separating policies from enforcement mechanisms and minimizing information leakage, enhancing confidentiality and flexibility.

Contribution

The paper presents ESPOON, a novel approach that enforces security policies without revealing sensitive policy details or requester attributes in untrusted environments.

Findings

Effective policy enforcement with minimal information leakage

Separation of policies from enforcement mechanisms improves flexibility

Applicable in outsourced environments with confidentiality concerns

Abstract

The enforcement of security policies in outsourced environments is still an open challenge for policy-based systems. On the one hand, taking the appropriate security decision requires access to the policies. However, if such access is allowed in an untrusted environment then confidential information might be leaked by the policies. Current solutions are based on cryptographic operations that embed security policies with the security mechanism. Therefore, the enforcement of such policies is performed by allowing the authorised parties to access the appropriate keys. We believe that such solutions are far too rigid because they strictly intertwine authorisation policies with the enforcing mechanism. In this paper, we want to address the issue of enforcing security policies in an untrusted environment while protecting the policy confidentiality. Our solution ESPOON is aiming at providing a clear separation between security policies and the enforcement mechanism. However, the enforcement mechanism should learn as less as possible about both the policies and the requester attributes.