Towards an Auditable Cryptographic Access Control to High-value Sensitive Data

We discuss the challenge of achieving an auditable key management for cryptographic access control to high-value sensitive data. In such settings it is important to be able to audit the key management process - and in particular to be able to provide verifiable proofs of key generation. The auditable key management has several possible use cases in both civilian and military world. In particular, the new regulations for protection of sensitive personal data, such as GDPR, introduce strict requirements for handling of personal data and apply a very restrictive definition of what can be considered a personal data. Cryptographic access control for personal data has a potential to become extremely important for preserving industrial ability to innovate, while protecting subject’s privacy, especially in the context of widely deployed modern monitoring, tracking and profiling capabilities, that are used by both governmental institutions and high-tech companies. However, in general, an encrypted data is still considered as personal under GDPR and therefore cannot be, e.g., stored or processed in a public cloud or distributed ledger. In our work we propose an identity-based cryptographic framework that ensures confidentiality, availability, integrity of data while potentially remaining compliant with the GDPR framework.