Enforcing Subscription-Based Authorization Policies in Cloud Scenarios

Overview & Synopsis

The rapid advances in the Information and Communication Technologies have brought to the development of on-demand high quality applications and services allowing users to easily access resources anywhere anytime. Users can pay for a service and access the resources made available during their subscriptions until the subscribed periods expire. Users are then forced to download such resources if they want to access them also after the subscribed periods. To avoid this burden to the users, we propose the adoption of a subscription-based access control policy that combines a flexible key derivation structure with selective encryption. The publication of new resources as well as the management of subscriptions are accommodated by adapting the key derivation structure in a transparent way for the users.