Towards virtuous cloud data storage using access policy hiding in ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption

Managing and controlling access to the tremendous data in Cloud storage is very challenging. Due to various entities engaged in the Cloud environment, there is a high possibility of data tampering. Cloud encryption is being employed to control data access while securing Cloud data. The encrypted data are sent to Cloud storage with an access policy defined by the data owner. Only authorized users can decrypt the encrypted data. However, the access policy of the encrypted data is in readable form, which results in privacy leakage. To address this issue, we proposed a reinforcement hiding in access policy over Cloud storage by enhancing the Ciphertext Policy Attribute-based Encryption (CP-ABE) algorithm. Besides the encryption process, the reinforced CPABE used logical connective operations to hide the attribute value of data in the access policy. These attributes were converted into scrambled data along with a ciphertext form that provides a better unreadability feature. It means that a two-level concealed tactic is employed to secure data from any unauthorized access during a data transaction. Experimental results revealed that our reinforced CPABE had a low computational overhead and consumed low storage costs. Furthermore, a case study on security analysis shows that our approach is secure against a passive attack such as traffic analysis.

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