Trusted data sharing with flexible access control based on blockchain

Abstract Along with the progress of cloud service, a growing quantity of data owners store their data on cloud databases, which can not only reduce data owners’ storage cost but also provide a quick search function. However, while cloud storage brings some conveniences to users, new privacy problems may emerge, such as the leakage of data privacy and user’s query privacy. The best way of protecting data privacy is to encrypt the data. So how to efficiently retrieve the ciphertext to make it available becomes a hot issue in recent years. In this paper, new searchable encryption with multiple keywords is described, it can improve the accuracy of retrieval results, and we present a secure and trusted data sharing framework based on attribute-based encryption (ABE), searchable encryption, and blockchain. Unlike the previous studies, we realize flexible data sharing by using ABE. Furthermore, we transfer the related calculation of ciphertext retrieval to blockchain for credible execution without relying on any trusted third party. The security analysis proves that our method meets the proposed security requirements of data, keyword index, trapdoor, and query. Finally, the experimental results indicate that our scheme suggested has certain practicability and efficiency.