A secure access and associate deleting scheme for multi-replica in multi-cloud environment

Abstract

With the rapid development of cloud services in multi-cloud environment, it is convenient to generate multi-replica for user's data stored in multi-cloud servers. On the one hand, multi-replica is able to improve data availability and users' experience. But on the other hand, it becomes increasingly easy to disclose sensitive data and brings serious challenges to security and privacy for user's data and its multi-replica. In order to tackle the above issues, in this paper, we propose a secure access and associate deleting scheme for multi-replica MADS in multi-cloud environment, which is based on symmetric encryption algorithm, attribute-based encryption and replica location technology. We construct a novel multi-layered key structure, called multi-way search key tree MSKT that ensures no key material will be revealed, yet the data owner is able to control the master key and manage other keys by performing some tree operations. We also propose a data replica associated model, which is able to associate all he data replicas in multi-cloud environment. Comprehensive comparison and security analysis demonstrate that the proposed MADS scheme is effective and secure.