Access Control: Ciphertext Policy - Attribute Based Encryption in Cloud Computing

Abstract

Access control and confidentiality is important features for cloud storage. The cloud service allows data owner to outsource their data to the cloud and through which provide the data access to the users. Although cloud computing brings many benefits, it may suffer from conventional distributed systems’ security attacks. Because the cloud server and the data owner are not in the same trust domain, the semi-trusted cloud server cannot be relied to enforce the access policy. However, storing the data in the untrusted cloud server leads the privacy and access control issues in the cloud. The traditional encryption schemes such as symmetric and asymmetric schemes are not suitable to provide the access control due to lack of flexibility and fine-grained access control. One of the prominent cryptographic technique to provide privacy and fine-grained access control in cloud computing is Attribute Based Encryption. In this paper, access control ABAC framework will be introduced for cloud storage systems that achieves finegrained access control based on an adapted Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-based Encryption (CP-ABE) approach.