Secure and efficient data retrieval over encrypted data using attribute-based encryption in cloud storage

Abstract

The cloud storage based information retrieval service is a promising technology that will form a vigorous market in the near future. Although there have been numerous studies proposed about secure data retrieval over encrypted data in cloud services, most of them focus on providing the strict security for the data stored in a third party domain. However, those approaches require stupendous costs centralized on the cloud service provider, which could be a principal impediment to achieve efficient data retrieval in cloud storage. In this paper, we propose an efficient data retrieval scheme using attribute-based encryption. The proposed scheme is best suited for cloud storage systems with massive amount of data. It provides rich expressiveness as regards access control and fast searches with simple comparisons of searching entities. The proposed scheme also guarantees data security and user privacy during the data retrieval process. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.