A Data Sharing Protocol to Minimize Security and Privacy Risks of Cloud Storage in Big Data Era

A cloud-based big data sharing system utilizes a storage facility from a cloud service provider to share data with legitimate users. In contrast to traditional solutions, cloud provider stores the shared data in the large data centers outside the trust domain of the data owner, which may trigger the problem of data confidentiality. This paper proposes a secret sharing group key management protocol (SSGK) to protect the communication process and shared data from unauthorized access. Different from the prior works, a group key is used to encrypt the shared data and a secret sharing scheme is used to distribute the group key in SSGK. The extensive security and performance analyses indicate that our protocol highly minimizes the security and privacy risks of sharing data in cloud storage and saves about 12% of storage space.