Privacy preserving and delegated access control for cloud applications

In cloud computing applications, users' data and applications are hosted by cloud providers. This paper proposed an access control scheme that uses a combination of discretionary access control and cryptographic techniques to secure users' data and applications hosted by cloud providers. Many cloud applications require users to share their data and applications hosted by cloud providers. To facilitate resource sharing, the proposed scheme allows cloud users to delegate their access permissions to other users easily. Using the access control policies that guard the access to resources and the credentials submitted by users, a third party can infer information about the cloud users. The proposed scheme uses cryptographic techniques to obscure the access control policies and users' credentials to ensure the privacy of the cloud users. Data encryption is used to guarantee the confidentiality of data. Compared with existing schemes, the proposed scheme is more flexible and easy to use. Experiments showed that the proposed scheme is also efficient.