An efficient key management scheme for user access control in outsourced databases

Recently, researches on key management scheme for user access control in outsourced databases have been actively done. Because outsourced databases require dealing with a lot of users and data resources, an efficient key management scheme for reducing the number of authentication keys is required. However, the existing schemes have a critical problem that the cost of key management is rapidly increasing as the number of keys becomes larger. To solve the problem, we propose an efficient key management scheme for user access control in outsourced databases. For this, we propose an Resource Set Tree(RST)-based key generation algorithm to reduce key generation cost by merging duplicated data resources. In addition, we propose a hierarchical Chinese Remainder Theorem(CRT)-based key assignment algorithm which can verify a user permission to gain accesses to outsourced databases. Our algorithm can reduce key update cost because the redistribution of authentication keys is not required. We also provide the analytic cost models of our algorithms and verify the correctness of the theoretical analysis by comparing them with experiment results. Finally, we show from the performance analysis that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing schemes in terms of both key generation cost and update cost.