Efficient utilization of elliptic curve cryptosystem for hierarchical access control

The elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC) has recently received significant attention by researchers due to its high performance, low computational cost, and small key size. In this paper, an efficient key management and derivation scheme based on ECC is proposed to solve dynamic access problems in a user hierarchy. Compared to previous ECC based works, the proposed method does not require constructing interpolate polynomials, therefore, the computational complexity of key generation and key derivation is significantly reduced. At the same time, time complexity of adding/deleting security classes, modifying their relationships, and changing of secret keys is decreased in the proposed method.