A robust cryptographic-based system for secure data sharing in cloud environments

Over the past few years, the usage of cloud storage services has been growing rapidly to share digital objects between data owner and consumers. However, such environment introduces many data privacy disclosure challenges. These challenges are maintaining data confidentiality, enforcing fine-grained data access control, applying efficient user revocation mechanism, and resisting collusion between system users. In addition, such environment imposes the support of system scalability and generic implementation features. Unfortunately, the proposal of a robust system that accomplishes all data privacy disclosure challenges and the mentioned features is still an open problem. In this paper, a robust cryptographic-based system that solves the stated problem is presented. In addition, the proposed system offers a novel architecture of data consumer digital identity. The presented digital identity solves scalability challenges faced by previous works without complicating data management for both data owner and consumer. Moreover, the proposed digital identity eliminates the need of online presence of data owner and consumer to exchange any information. Furthermore, the proposed system defends man-in-the-middle attack, ensures identity of participants, achieves non-repudiation, and maintains role separation between different participants. Finally, the proposed system implementation proofs the system validity to accomplish all the specified goals with acceptable performance. Copyright (C) 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.