Incremental proxy re-encryption scheme for mobile cloud computing environment

Due to the limited computational capability of mobile devices, the research organization and academia are working on computationally secure schemes that have capability for offloading the computational intensive data access operations on the cloud/trusted entity for execution. Most of the existing security schemes, such as proxy re-encryption, manager-based re-encryption, and cloud-based re-encryption, are based on El-Gamal cryptosystem for offloading the computational intensive data access operation on the cloud/trusted entity. However, the resource hungry pairing-based cryptographic operations, such as encryption and decryption, are executed using the limited computational power of mobile device. Similarly, if the data owner wants to modify the encrypted file uploaded on the cloud storage, after modification the data owner must encrypt and upload the entire file on the cloud storage without considering the altered portion(s) of the file. In this paper, we have proposed an incremental version of proxy re-encryption scheme for improving the file modification operation and compared with the original version of the proxy re-encryption scheme on the basis of turnaround time, energy consumption, CPU utilization, and memory consumption while executing the security operations on mobile device. The incremental version of proxy re-encryption scheme shows significant improvement in results while performing file modification operations using limited processing capability of mobile devices.