Confidentiality-preserving distributed proofs of conjunctive queries

Distributed proof construction protocols have been shown to be valuable for reasoning about authorization decisions in open distributed environments such as pervasive computing spaces. Unfortunately, existing distributed proof protocols offer only limited support for protecting the confidentiality of sensitive facts, which limits their utility in many practical scenarios. In this paper, we propose a distributed proof construction protocol in which the release of a fact's truth value can be made contingent upon facts managed by other principals in the system. We formally prove that our protocol can safely prove conjunctions of facts without leaking the truth values of individual facts, even in the face of colluding adversaries and fact release policies with cyclical dependencies. This facilitates the definition of context-sensitive release policies that enable the conditional use of sensitive facts in distributed proofs. Copyright 2009 ACM