On Using Encryption Techniques to Enhance Sticky Policies Enforcement

How to enforce privacy policies to protect sensitive personal data has become an urgent research topic for security researchers, as very little has been done in this field apart from some ad hoc research efforts. The sticky policy paradigm, proposed by Karjoth, Schunter, and Waidner, provides very useful inspiration on how we can protect sensitive personal data, but the enforcement is very weak. In this paper we provide an overview of the state of the art in enforcing sticky policies, especially the concept of sticky policy enforcement using encryption techniques including Public-Key Encryption (PKE), Identity-Based Encryption (IBE), Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE), and Proxy Re-Encryption (PRE). We provide detailed comparison results on the (dis)advantages of these enforcement mechanisms. As a result of the analysis, we provide a general framework for enhancing sticky policy enforcement using Type-based PRE (TPRE), which is an extension of general PRE.