Delegation with supervision

Delegation certificates (e.g. SPKI) support the decentralized management of access rights in organizations without the need for a centralized server to mediate every delegation operation. However, it does not allow the access rights to be delegated in a flexible way. For instance, a user cannot be granted the authorization to perform delegation of permission without granting himself/herself the authorization to exercise the associated permission at the same time. In this paper, we propose an improved delegation model, where the various users in a delegation chain may perform supervision on the delegate to exercise the delegated permission. We describe the way to support the model using SPKI as an example. Also, we describe how to support efficient authorization in delegation with supervision using proxy signature techniques. (c) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.