Developing a Secure Encrypted Data Management System in Cloud Environment

Abstract

Over the past few years, the usage of cloud storage services has been growing rapidly to share digital objects between data owners and data users. However, such architecture introduces many data privacy disclosure threats. Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) has evolved as a promising technique to protect data privacy in one-to-many data sharing scenarios. ABE achieves data confidentiality and enforces fine-grained access control. Unfortunately, ABE schemes face number of essential challenges that hinders these schemes implementation in cloud storage services. These challenges are applying efficient user revocation mechanism and prohibiting collusion between system users. In addition, the existence of a single authority for attributes management prevents ABE scheme scalability and represents a major performance bottleneck. Moreover, the lack of an efficient attribute revocation mechanism represents a crucial threat for data privacy. Furthermore, the deployment of attribute revocation as a mechanism for user revocation represents an essential obstacle for scheme scalability and flexibility. In addition, cloud storage services environment imposes the support for scheme scalability and generic implementation features. Unfortunately, the proposal of a robust system that accomplishes all these challenges is still an open problem. In this work, a secure encrypted data management system based on ABE, Proxy Re-encryption (PRE) and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is presented to achieve number of security challenges. The presented work accomplishes data confidentiality, fine-grained data access control, efficient user revocation, collusion resistance, scalability, generic implementation, efficient attribute revocation and multi-authority attributes management. In addition, the proposed system offers a novel architecture of data user digital identity to achieve its targets. Moreover, the proposed system does not oblige the participated attributes authorities to cooperate. Therefore, the attributes authorities can join or leave the proposed system without affecting the existing system users