Title: Chain reduction of authorisation certificates

Authors: Yki Kortesniemi; Timo Kiravuo; Mikko Särelä; Hannu H. Kari

Addresses: School of Electrical Engineering, Aalto University, Espoo 02150, Finland ' School of Electrical Engineering, Aalto University, Espoo 02150, Finland ' School of Electrical Engineering, Aalto University, Espoo 02150, Finland ' National Defence University, Helsinki, Finland

Abstract: Authorisation certificate based access control relies on delegation as a means of distributing the access rights. Unfortunately, the resulting certificate chains can cause performance and privacy issues. Certificate chain reduction is a proposed solution that replaces a chain of certificates with a single certificate of equal functionality. In this paper we analyse chain reduction and find a number of issues in implementing the reduction. We evaluate the performance improvements and find reduction an effective tool. We also evaluate the suitability of certificates for embedded platforms by implementing a prototype. We propose that a number of use cases exhibits an hourglass-shaped chain structure that allows for a consistent performance of verifying just one certificate using reduction. Privacy, on the other hand, is more difficult to improve and all the assumed goals cannot be achieved with chain reduction alone. We use SPKI certificates for our analysis.

Keywords: authorisation certificates; certificate chains; chain reduction; performance improvement; privacy protection; privacy preservation; SPKI; public key infrastructure; IoT; internet of things; embedded systems; access control; network security.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSN.2015.070424

International Journal of Security and Networks, 2015 Vol.10 No.2, pp.107 - 123

Received: 08 Sep 2014
Accepted: 17 Feb 2015
Published online: 05 Jul 2015 *

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