Policy-hiding access control in open environment
In trust management and attribute-based access control systems, access control decisions are based on the attributes (rather than the identity) of the requester: Access is granted if Alice's attributes in her certificates satisfy Bob's access control policy. In this paper, we develop a policy-hiding access control scheme that protects both sensitive attributes and sensitive policies. That is, Bob can decide whether Alice's certified attribute values satisfy Bob's policy, without Bob learning any other information about Alice's attribute values or Alice learning Bob's policy. To enable policy-hiding access control, we introduce the notion of certified input private policy evaluation. Our construction uses Yao's scrambled circuit protocol and two new techniques introduced in this paper. One novel technique is constructing circuits with uniform topology that can compute arbitrary functions in a family. The other technique is committed-integer based oblivious transfer.

title: A Construction for General and Efficient Oblivious Commitment Based Envelope Protocols
abstract: The notion of Oblivious Commitment Based Envelope (OCBE) was recently proposed; it enables attribute-based access control without revealing any information about the attributes. Previous OCBE protocols are designed by taking zero-knowledge proof protocols that prove a committed value satisfies some property and changing the protocols so that instead of one party proving to the other party, the two parties compute two keys that agree if and only if the committed value indeed satisfy the property. In this paper, we introduce a more general approach for designing OCBE protocols that uses zero-knowledge proof protocols in a black-box fashion. We present a construction such that given a zero-knowledge proof protocol that proves a committed value satisfies a predicate, we have an OCBE protocol for that predicate with constant additional cost. Compared with previous OCBE protocols, our construction is more general, more efficient, and has wide applicability.

title: Trust Negotiation with Hidden Credentials, Hidden Policies, and Policy Cycles
abstract: In an open environment such as the Internet, the decision to collaborate with a stranger (e.g., by granting access to a resource) is often based on the characteristics (rather than the identity) of the requester, via digital credentials: Access is granted if Alice’s credentials satisfy Bob’s access policy. The literature contains many examples where protecting the credentials and the access control policies is useful, and there are numerous protocols that achieve this. In many of these schemes, the server does not learn whether the client obtained access (e.g., to a message, or a service via an eticket). A consequence of this property is that the client can use all of her credentials without fear of “probing” attacks by the server, because the server cannot glean information about which credentials the client has (when this property is lacking, the literature uses a framework where the very use of a credential is subject to a policy specific to that credential). The main result of this paper is a protocol for negotiating trust between Alice and Bob without revealing either credentials or policies, when each credential has its own access policy associated with it (e.g., “a top-secret clearance credential can only be used when the other party is a government employee and has a top-secret clearance”). Our protocol carries out this privacy-preserving trust negotiation between Alice and Bob, while enforcing each credential’s policy (thereby protecting sensitive credentials). Note that there can be a deep nesting of dependencies between credential policies, and that there can be (possibly overlapping) policy cycles of these dependencies. Our result is not achieved through the routine use of standard techniques to implement, in this framework, one of the known strategies for trust negotiations (such as the “eager strategy”). Rather, this paper uses novel techniques to implement a non-standard trust negotiation strategy specifically suited to this framework (and in fact unusable outside of this framework, as will become clear). Our work is therefore Portions of this work were supported by Grants IIS-0325345, IIS0219560, IIS-0312357, and IIS-0242421 from the National Science Foundation, Contract N00014-02-1-0364 from the Office of Naval Research, by sponsors of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security, and by Purdue Discovery Park’s e-enterprise Center. a substantial extension of the state-of-the-art in privacypreserving trust negotiations.

title: OACerts: Oblivious Attribute Certificates
abstract: We propose oblivious attribute certificates (OACerts), an attribute certificate scheme in which a certificate holder can select which attributes to use and how to use them. In particular, a user can use attribute values stored in an OACert obliviously, i.e., the user obtains a service if and only if the attribute values satisfy the policy of the service provider, yet the service provider learns nothing about these attribute values. This way, the service provider's access control policy is enforced in an oblivious fashion. To enable the oblivious access control using OACerts, we propose a new cryptographic primitive called oblivious commitment-based envelope (OCBE). In an OCBE scheme, Bob has an attribute value committed to Alice and Alice runs a protocol with Bob to send an envelope (encrypted message) to Bob such that: 1) Bob can open the envelope if and only if his committed attribute value satisfies a predicate chosen by Alice and 2) Alice learns nothing about Bob's attribute value. We develop provably secure and efficient OCBE protocols for the Pedersen commitment scheme and comparison predicates as well as logical combinations of them

title: Hidden access control policies with hidden credentials
abstract: In an open environment such as the Internet, the decision to collaborate with a stranger (e.g., by granting access to a resource) is often based on the characteristics (rather than the identity) of the requester, via digital credentials: Access is granted if Alice's credentials satisfy Bob's access policy. The literature contains many scenarios in which it is desirable to carry out such trust negotiations in a privacy-preserving manner, i.e., so as minimize the disclosure of credentials and/or of access policies. Elegant solutions were proposed for achieving various degrees of privacy-preservation through minimal disclosure. In this paper, we present an efficient protocol that protects both sensitive credentials and policies. That is, Alice gets the resource only if she satisfies Bob's policy, Bob does not learn anything about Alice's credentials (not even whether Alice got access or not), and Alice learns neither Bob's policy structure nor which credentials caused her to gain access.

title: Universal Accumulators with Efficient Nonmembership Proofs
abstract: Based on the notion of accumulators, we propose a new cryptographic scheme called universal accumulators. This scheme enables one to commit to a set of values using a short accumulator and to efficiently compute a membership witness of any value that has been accumulated. Unlike traditional accumulators, this scheme also enables one to efficiently compute a nonmembership witness of any value that has not been accumulated. We give a construction for universal accumulators and prove its security based on the strong RSA assumption. We further present a construction for dynamic universal accumulators; this construction allows one to dynamically add and delete inputs with constant computational cost. Our construction directly builds upon Camenisch and Lysyanskaya's dynamic accumulator scheme. Universal accumulators can be seen as an extension to dynamic accumulators with support of nonmembership witness. We also give an efficient zero-knowledge proof protocol for proving that a committed value is not in the accumulator. Our dynamic universal accumulator construction enables efficient membership revocation in an anonymous fashion.

title: OntSum: A Semantic Query Routing Scheme in P2P Networks Based on Concise Ontology Indexing
abstract: Locating desirable resources is very important for a large distributed system. However, the distributed, heterogeneous, and unstructured nature of the system makes this issue very challenging. The discovering mechanism has to be not only semantically rich, in order to cope with complex queries, but also scalable to handle large numbers of information sources. In this paper, we address these problems by proposing OntSum, an efficient peer-to-peer query routing scheme based on concise ontology indexing. Unlike most existing systems, our system does not assume a global ontology but heterogeneous ontologies. Peers in the system use their own ontologies to describe their resource knowledge and the network topology is adjusted according to peers' ontological properties. A novel indexing strategy enables forwarding queries only to semantically related nodes. The architecture improves interoperability among network participants and aids efficient resource discovery through an expressive query language.

title: Incorporating Legacy System into Semantic Grid Framework
abstract: The semantic grid is an extension of the current grid. Resources description framework (RDF) can be used to extend the current grid into semantic grid in which information and services are given well-defined meaning. This paper proposed an approach to recognizing the reusable components from the legacy system and representing these components by using XML and RDF, which could be performed for incorporating legacy system components into the semantic grid framework

title: An Empirical Study on Off-the-Shelf Component Usage in Industrial Projects
abstract: Using OTS (Off-The-Shelf) components in software projects has become increasing popular in the IT industry. After project managers opt for OTS components, they can decide to use COTS (Commercial-Off-The-Shelf) components or OSS (Open Source Software) components instead of building these themselves. This paper describes an empirical study on why project decision-makers use COTS components instead of OSS components, or vice versa. The study was performed in form of an international survey on motivation and risks of using OTS components, conducted in Norway, Italy and Germany. We have currently gathered data on 71 projects using only COTS components and 39 projects using only OSS components, and 5 using both COTS and OSS components. Results show that both COTS and OSS components were used in small, medium and large software houses and IT consulting companies. The overall software system also covers several application domains. Both COTS and OSS were expected to contribute to shorter time-to-market, less development effort and the application of newest technology. However, COTS users believe that COTS component should have good quality, technical support, and will follow the market trend. OSS users care more about the free ownership and openness of the source code. Projects using COTS components had more difficulties in estimating selection effort, following customer requirement changes, and controlling the component's negative effect on system security. On the other hand, OSS user had more difficulties in getting the support reputation of OSS component providers.

title: Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures by a Statistical Modeling Approach
abstract: Automatic linguistic indexing of pictures is an important but highly challenging problem for researchers in computer vision and content-based image retrieval. In this paper, we introduce a statistical modeling approach to this problem. Categorized images are used to train a dictionary of hundreds of statistical models each representing a concept. Images of any given concept are regarded as instances of a stochastic process that characterizes the concept. To measure the extent of association between an image and the textual description of a concept, the likelihood of the occurrence of the image based on the characterizing stochastic process is computed. A high likelihood indicates a strong association. In our experimental implementation, we focus on a particular group of stochastic processes, that is, the two-dimensional multiresolution hidden Markov models (2D MHMMs). We implemented and tested our ALIP (Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures) system on a photographic image database of 600 different concepts, each with about 40 training images. The system is evaluated quantitatively using more than 4,600 images outside the training database and compared with a random annotation scheme. Experiments have demonstrated the good accuracy of the system and its high potential in linguistic indexing of photographic images.

title: mSSL: extending SSL to support data sharing among collaborative clients
abstract: Client-server applications often do not scale well when a large number of clients access a single server. To solve this, a new trend is to allow a client to download data from other peer clients, in addition to from the server directly. This paradigm, which we call the hybrid peer-to-peer paradigm, is friendly to the server's scalability, but also faces new security challenges. For example, how can the server authenticate its clients and support data confidentiality? How can a client trust the data downloaded from other clients? What if a client refuses to acknowledge the service it received or overstates the service it offered? In this paper, we present a protocol, called mSSL, that provides a set of security functions to enable secure sharing of the data of a server among its clients. In addition to access control and confidentiality support, mSSL provides an original design on supporting data integrity and proof of service in this new context. Our evaluation further shows that mSSL has a reasonable overhead