Group Key Management and Sharing Protocol in Cloud Computing Environment

In cloud computing environments, secured group communication is vital for protecting shared resources and ensuring authorized access. Group key management and sharing protocols play a critical role in maintaining the data security by enabling efficient and secure key distribution among group members. Cloud computing is a model wherein resources on the Internet establish a resource pool and may be dynamically assigned to diverse applications as well as services. Ensuring security in cloud storage is not easy. As data on cloud is beyond the control area of authentic participants, shared data should be made usable on demand of authentic users. Shared data are vulnerable to misplaced or erroneously altered by Cloud Service Provider (CSP) or attackers. Defending data from illegal removal, alteration and fabrication is also challenging. Hence, in this paper Group Key Management and Sharing Protocol (GKMSP) is proposed. Group Key is produced by the data owner, while private and public keys are generated by the Trusted Authority (TA). The proposed scheme offers improved results in terms of Communication and storage costs based on number of groups, key generation and total times based on number of participants and number of participants based on size of attributes in contrast to benchmarked Self-healing Attribute-based Privacy-aware Data Sharing (SAPDS), Access Control Mechanism for P2P Storage Cloud (ACPC) and Robust and Auditable Access Control (RAAC) schemes.