Building A New World of Security With Zero Trust, Trusted Attributes and Claims
We have now started a new collaboration with MIRACL, and aim to build systems that have high levels of trust and implement a zero-trust environment. Along with this, we aim to implement the latest methods in Zero Knowledge Proofs and Homomorphic Encryption (along with adopting the latest Post Quantum Cryptography). In this article, we will investigate the usage of trusted attributes to encrypt a file, and then use a cipher policy to unlock it.
Old-world, new-world
There’s an old world of security, and there’s a new world. Our old world is based on mapping users to roles and then defining the rights of the user dependent on their role. Unfortunately, this becomes complex once we scale our system up, and can often give generalised access to those who do not need it. To simplify, we can generalise the roles, but, again, we can give access to things that are not actually required. For example, we might have staff and students as a role and keep things simple. But, we now need to provide all staff with given rights, and all students with another set of rights. In most systems, we end up with multiple roles where each gives their own rights, and might even conflict with each other.
