An access control mechanism is a technology to protect the
confidential files stored in a database by restricting the
access rights of different approved users of these files. In
this paper, we propose a novel access control mechanism
using the single-key-lock system and the generalized
Aryabhata remainder theorem (GART), in which each user
is associated with a key and each digital file with a lock.
Our mechanism possesses three unique features, 1) a high
efficiency of constructing the keys for the users and the
locks for the files; 2) a simple operation on the user’s key
and on the file’s lock allows the user access to the file; and
3) the keys for adding or deleting a user can be updated
easily without affecting the existing keys for other users.
