Biblio

Privacy and security are the most important issues to the popularity of cloud computing service. In recent years, there are many research schemes of cloud computing privacy protection based on access control, attribute-based encryption (ABE), trust and reputation, but they are scattered and lack unified logic. In this paper, we systematically review and analyze relevant research achievements. First, we discuss the architecture, concepts and several shortcomings of cloud computing, and propose a framework of privacy protection; second, we discuss and analyze basic ABE, KP-ABE (key policy attribute-based encryption), CP-ABE (ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption), access structure, revocation mechanism, multi-authority, fine-grained, trace mechanism, proxy re-encryption (PRE), hierarchical encryption, searchable encryption (SE), trust, reputation, extension of tradition access control and hierarchical key; third, we propose the research challenge and future direction of the privacy protection in the cloud computing; finally, we point out corresponding privacy protection laws to make up for the technical deficiencies.

With the vast increase in data transmission due to a large number of information collected by devices, data management, and security has been a challenge for organizations. Many data owners (DOs) outsource their data to cloud repositories due to several economic advantages cloud service providers present. However, DOs, after their data are outsourced, do not have complete control of the data, and therefore, external systems are incorporated to manage the data. Several kinds of research refer to the use of encryption techniques to prevent unauthorized access to data but prove to be deficient in providing suitable solutions to the problem. In this article, we propose a secure fine-grain access control system for outsourced data, which supports read and write operations to the data. We make use of an attribute-based encryption (ABE) scheme, which is regarded as a suitable scheme to achieve access control for security and privacy (confidentiality) of outsourced data. This article considers different categories of data users, and make provisions for distinct access roles and permissible actions on the outsourced data with dynamic and efficient policy updates to the corresponding ciphertext in cloud repositories. We adopt blockchain technologies to enhance traceability and visibility to enable control over outsourced data by a DO. The security analysis presented demonstrates that the security properties of the system are not compromised. Results based on extensive experiments illustrate the efficiency and scalability of our system.

The revelations of Snowden show that hardware and software of devices may corrupt users' machine to compromise the security in various ways. To address this concern, Mironov and Stephen-Davidowitz introduce the Cryptographic Reverse Firewall (CRF) concept that is able to resist the ex-filtration of secret information for some compromised machine (Eurocrypt 2015). There are some applications of CRF deployed in many cryptosystems, but less studied and deployed in Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) field, which attracts a wide range of attention and is employed in real-world scenarios (i.e., data sharing in cloud). In this work, we focus how to give a CRF security protection for a multi-authority ABE scheme and hence propose a multi-authority key-policy ABE scheme with CRF (acronym, MA-KP-ABE-CRF), which supports attribute distribution and non-monotonic access structure. To achieve this, beginning with revisiting a MA-KP-ABE with non-trivial combining non-monotonic formula, we then give the randomness of ciphertexts and secret keys with reverse firewall and give formal security analysis. Finally, we give a simulation on our MA-KP-ABE-CRF system based on Charm library whose the experimental results demonstrate practical efficiency.

In this paper, we present the enhancement of a lightweight key-policy attribute-based encryption (KP-ABE) scheme designed for the Internet of Things (IoT). The KP-ABE scheme was claimed to achieve ciphertext indistinguishability under chosen-plaintext attack in the selective-set model but we show that the KP-ABE scheme is insecure even in the weaker security notion, namely, one-way encryption under the same attack and model. In particular, we show that an attacker can decrypt a ciphertext which does not satisfy the policy imposed on his decryption key. Subsequently, we propose an efficient fix to the KP-ABE scheme as well as extending it to be a hierarchical KP-ABE (H-KP-ABE) scheme that can support role delegation in IoT applications. An example of applying our H-KP-ABE on an IoT-connected healthcare system is given to highlight the benefit of the delegation feature. Lastly, using the NIST curves secp192k1 and secp256k1, we benchmark the fixed (hierarchical) KP-ABE scheme on an Android phone and the result shows that the scheme is still the fastest in the literature.