A practical group key management algorithm for cloud data sharing with dynamic group

Cloud data sharing service, which allows a group of people to work together to access and modify the shared data, is one of the most popular and efficient working styles in the enterprises. However, the cloud server is not completely trusted, and its security could be compromised by monetary reasons or caused by hacking and hardware errors. Therefore, despite of having advantages of scalability and flexibility, cloud storage service comes with privacy and the security concerns. A straightforward method to protect the user's privacy is to encrypt the data stored at the cloud. To enable the authenticated users to access the encrypted cloud data, a practical group key management algorithm for the cloud data sharing application is highly desired. The existing group key management mechanisms presume that the server is trusted. But, the cloud data service mode does not always meet this condition. How to manage the group keys to support the scenario of the cloud storage with a semi-trusted cloud server is still a challenging task. Moreover, the cloud storage system is a large-scale and open application, in which the user group is dynamic. To address this problem, we propose a practical group key management algorithm based on a proxy re-encryption mechanism in this paper. We use the cloud server to act as a proxy to re-encrypt the group key to allow authorized users to decrypt and get the group key by their private key. To achieve the hierarchical access control policy, our scheme enables the cloud server to convert the encrypted group key of the lower group to the upper group. The numerical analysis and experimental results further validate the high efficiency and security of the proposed scheme.