Secure Data Sharing With Efficient Key Update for Industrial Cloud-Based Access Control

Sharing data in industrial cloud requires both secure and flexible management of data shared among users in the industry. Users should have ability to access authorized portion of data from smart edge devices with integrated secure protocol for interacting with cloud storage. Among cryptographic-based access control solutions, ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is recognized as a suitable solution for supporting secure and fine-grained access control for outsourced data. However, the attribute revocation is a major drawback of CP-ABE since it introduces subsequent costs such as ciphertext re-encryption, user key re-generation, and key re-distribution. Existing revocable CP-ABE based access control models have focused on minimizing the cost of communication and computation cost for ciphertext re-encryption. Unfortunately, the key update issue is subject to re-key generation as traditional CP-ABE does. In essence, key update becomes crucial when there are a high number of users accessing shared data in the cloud. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and scalable access control model featured with the efficient key update scheme. A key piece of this work is that we utilize an attribute certificate (AC) to support the authorization within the CP-ABE scheme. Finally, the performance evaluation is conducted to demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed scheme.