Sharing and access right delegation for confidential documents: A practical solution

Abstract

This paper addresses a practical problem in document management systems for which no existing solution is currently available in the market. To store confidential documents, a common approach is to keep only the encrypted version of the documents to ensure confidentiality of the contents. In real cases, documents may need to be shared by more than one person or group in a company and it is common for a manager to delegate the access rights of a documents to a delegatee. How is it possible to share encrypted documents and delegate the access rights of encrypted documents? Here, we discuss the issues related to this problem and provide a practical and easy-to-implement solution for solving the problem. It has been shown to be feasible by a prototype implementation. We also show how to extend our solution to be more scalable by taking advantage of the company's hierarchical structure. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.