DAC-MACS: Effective data access control for multiauthority cloud storage systems

Data access control is an effective way to ensure data security in the cloud. However, due to data outsourcing and untrusted cloud servers, the data access control becomes a challenging issue in cloud storage systems. Existing access control schemes are no longer applicable to cloud storage systems, because they either produce multiple encrypted copies of the same data or require a fully trusted cloud server. Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is a promising technique for access control of encrypted data. However, due to the inefficiency of decryption and revocation, existing CP-ABE schemes cannot be directly applied to construct a data access control scheme for multiauthority cloud storage systems, where users may hold attributes from multiple authorities. In this paper, we propose data access control for multiauthority cloud storage (DAC-MACS), an effective and secure data access control scheme with efficient decryption and revocation. Specifically, we construct a new multiauthority CP-ABE scheme with efficient decryption, and also design an efficient attribute revocation method that can achieve both forward security and backward security. We further propose an extensive data access control scheme (EDAC-MACS), which is secure under weaker security assumptions. © 2013 IEEE.