Enforcing location and time-based access control on cloud-stored data

Abstract

Recent incidents of data-breaches from the cloud suggest that users should not trust the cloud provider to enforce access control on their data. We focus on mitigating trust to the cloud in scenarios where granting access to data not only considers user identities (as in conventional access policies), but also contextual information such as the user's location and time of access. Previous work in this context assumes a fully trusted cloud that is further capable of locating users. We introduce LoTAC, a novel framework that seamlessly integrates the operation of a cloud provider and a localization infrastructure to enforce location-and time-based access control to cloud-stored data. In LoTAC, the two entities operate independently and are only trusted to offer their basic services: the cloud provider is used and trusted only to reliably store data, the localization infrastructure is used and trusted only to accurately locate users. Furthermore, neither the cloud provider nor the localization infrastructure can access the data, even if they collude. LoTAC protocols require no changes to the cloud provider and minimal changes to the localization infrastructure. We evaluate our protocols using a cellular network as the localization infrastructure and show that they incur in low communication and computation costs and scale well with a large number of users and policies.