International Journal on Very Large Data Bases manuscript No. (will be inserted by the edit.pdfVIP

International Journal on Very Large Data Bases manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Succinct Representation of Flexible and Privacy-Preserving Access Rights? Marina Blanton, Mikhail Atallah Department of Computer Science Purdue University West Lafayette, IN 47907 e-mail: {mbykova,mja}@ The date of receipt and acceptance will be inserted by the editor Abstract We explore the problem of portable and flexible privacy pre- serving access rights that permit access to a large collection of digital goods. Privacy-preserving access control means that the service provider can nei- ther learn what access rights a customer has nor link a request to access an item to a particular customer, thus maintaining privacy of both customer activity and customer access rights. Flexible access rights allow a customer to choose a subset of items or groups of items from the repository, obtain access to and be charged only for the items selected. And portability of ac- cess rights means that the rights themselves can be stored on small devices of limited storage space and computational capabilities such as smartcards or sensors, and therefore the rights must be enforced using the limited re- sources available. In this paper, we present and compare two schemes that address the problem of such access rights. We show that much can be achieved if one allows for even a negligible amount of false positives — items that were not requested by the customer, but inadvertently were included in the cus- tomer access right representation due to constrained space resources. But minimizing false positives is one of many other desiderata that include pro- tection against sharing of false positives information by unscrupulous users, providing the users with transaction untraceability and unlinkability, and forward compatibility of the scheme. Our first scheme does not place any ? Portions of this work were supported by Grants IIS-0325345, IIS-0219560, IIS-0312357, and IIS-0242421 from the National