Sibling intractable function family (SIFF) notion, construction and applications

This paper presents a new concept in cryptography called the sibling intractable function family (SIFF) which has the property that given a set of initial strings colliding with one another, it is computationally infeasible to find another string that would collide with the initial strings. The various concepts behind SIFF are presented together with a construction of SIFF from any one-way function. Applications of SIFF to many practical problems are also discussed. These include the hierarchical access control problem which is a long-standing open problem induced by a paper of Akl and Taylor about ten years ago, the shared mail box problem, access control in distributed systems and the multiple message authentication problem.