A Secure and Verifiable Access Control Scheme for Big Data Storage in Clouds

Abstract

Due to the complexity and volume, outsourcing ciphertexts to a cloud is deemed to be one of the most effective approaches for big data storage and access. Nevertheless, verifying the access legitimacy of a user and securely updating a ciphertext in the cloud based on a new access policy designated by the data owner are two critical challenges to make cloud-based big data storage practical and effective. Traditional approaches either completely ignore the issue of access policy update or delegate the update to a third party authority; but in practice, access policy update is important for enhancing security and dealing with the dynamism caused by user join and leave activities. In this paper, we propose a secure and verifiable access control scheme based on the NTRU cryptosystem for big data storage in clouds. We first propose a new NTRU decryption algorithm to overcome the decryption failures of the original NTRU, and then detail our scheme and analyze its correctness, security strengths, and computational efficiency. Our scheme allows the cloud server to efficiently update the ciphertext when a new access policy is specified by the data owner, who is also able to validate the update to counter against cheating behaviors of the cloud. It also enables (i) the data owner and eligible users to effectively verify the legitimacy of a user for accessing the data, and (ii) a user to validate the information provided by other users for correct plaintext recovery. Rigorous analysis indicates that our scheme can prevent eligible users from cheating and resist various attacks such as the collusion attack.