The delegation problem and practical pki-based solutions

Abstract

Delegation is a process where a delegator grants or authorizes all or some of his/her power to another a delegate to work on his/her behalf. In an office, it is common for officers to delegate their power to subordinates. In a digital environment (e.g. a secure enterprise information system with confidential electronic documents), how delegation can be handled properly is still an open question. In this paper, we address the delegation problem in the context of a secure information system, lay down a set of requirements from the users' point of view and propose several practical PKI-based schemes to solve the problem. Analysis on the proposed schemes concludes that Proxy Memo can solve the problem quite efficiently while reducing the key management problem.