Enabling Efficient Decentralized and Privacy Preserving Data Sharing in Mobile Cloud Computing

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) is embracing rapid development these days and able to provide data outsourcing and sharing services for cloud users with pervasively smart mobile devices. Although these services bring various conveniences, many security concerns such as illegally access and user privacy leakage are inflicted. Aiming to protect the security of cloud data sharing against unauthorized accesses, many studies have been conducted for fine-grained access control using ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE). However, a practical and secure data sharing scheme that simultaneously supports fine-grained access control, large university, key escrow free, and privacy protection in MCC with expressive access policy, high efficiency, verifiability, and exculpability on resource-limited mobile devices has not been fully explored yet. Therefore, we investigate the challenge and propose an Efficient and Multiauthority Large Universe Policy-Hiding Data Sharing (EMA-LUPHDS) scheme. In this scheme, we employ fully hidden policy to preserve the user privacy in access policy. To adapt to large scale and distributed MCC environment, we optimize multiauthority CP-ABE to be compatible with large attribute universe. Meanwhile, for the efficiency purpose, online/offline and verifiable outsourced decryption techniques with exculpability are leveraged in our scheme. In the end, we demonstrate the flexibility and high efficiency of our proposal for data sharing in MCC by extensive performance evaluation.