An Efficient Attribute-Based Encryption and Access Control Scheme for Cloud Storage Environment

With the prevalence of cloud computing, many enterprise users store confidential information in the cloud servers. Therefore, the problems of data security in cloud computing are particularly important. Cloud storage service providers must offer efficient cryptography system and access control scheme to users. In recent years, some researchers proposed identity-based hierarchical key deployment model for encryption and access control in cloud computing environment. However, some of these schemes have high computing cost and do not take authentication into consideration. In this paper, we proposed a low-cost cryptography system and attribute-based access control scheme for the cloud storage environment. The simulation results and analysis show that the proposed method has lower communication and computing cost than Hierarchical Attribute-Based Encryption (HABE). Our proposed scheme can achieve the data access control via user’s attribute-based rules. It also satisfies the authentication requirements by using identity-based signature in the cloud storage environment.