1 Timed Zero - Knowledge Proof ( Tzkp ) Protocol

Incorporating time to the security management system is an important step to streamline its integration with other resource management functions in the real-time distributed systems. In addition to protecting its security properties, minimizing operational overheads of security management is also a major design issue. In this paper, we propose a timed zero knowledge proof (TZKP) protocol to support the session based secure access control of timed resources for anonymous consumers. On the basis of Eng-Okamoto’s general disposable authentication (GDA) model, we show that the service provider (SP) can authorize the timed resource access by adding session to a control variable in GDA. The consumer who receives timed access authorizations (TAAs) from the SP may choose to transfer them to others. In classical ZKP protocols, each transfer instance requires spending of one consumer token, which makes this desirable feature costly. To minimize the transfer overhead, we propose the multisource reusability (MSR) condition that allows a consumer to reuse its token for multiple transactions with protected anonymity when no double spending of TAA occurs. TZKP not only reduces the amount of tokens that need to be withdrawn by consumers, but also eliminates the need to keep track of the tokens once their marked sessions are expired. On the basis of the proven security properties of GDA in each session, together with the introduction of session time and the reduced cost transfers, we show that TZKP protocol can be efficiently used for secure access of the shared computing resources for anonymous consumers. Experiments run on DETER testbed show that TZKP has small to moderate run time, and can be easily expanded for large scale applications.