Achieving privacy and security in multi-owner data outsourcing

Existing solutions for data protection and privacy in data outsourcing scenario generally emphasize on the access control model integrated with the advanced cryptographic techniques. However, the complexity of key management is still a recurrent problem when the environment composes of enormous numbers of users and several resource owners. In addition, the administrative capabilities to control the policies enforced in the collaborative cloud environment where several owners and users have not been explicitly provided by the existing works. In this paper, we propose a privacy enhancing access control model to address the scalability and fine-grained access control for outsourced data in multi-owner setting. The focus is to serve the privacy and integrity of outsourced data as well as the accountability. To this end, we employ a PKI key management and access control scheme to serve the security and privacy for the data, policy, and communication. We employ multi-agent system to accommodate multi-policy enforcement and support parallel processing of authorization requests. Our model supports both read and write access control and integrity of all access operations is served by signature-based that enables a full accountability of all accesses.