Secure and efficient data collaboration with hierarchical attribute-based encryption in cloud computing

With the increasing trend of outsourcing data to the cloud for efficient data storage, secure data collaboration service including data read and write in cloud computing is urgently required. However, it introduces many new challenges toward data security. The key issue is how to afford secure write operation on ciphertext collaboratively, and the other issues include difficulty in key management and heavy computation overhead on user since cooperative users may read and write data using any device. In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient data collaboration scheme, in which fine-grained access control of ciphertext and secure data writing operation can be afforded based on attribute-based encryption (ABE) and attribute-based signature (ABS) respectively. In order to relieve the attribute authority from heavy key management burden, our scheme employs a full delegation mechanism based on hierarchical attribute-based encryption (HABE). Further, we also propose a partial decryption and signing construction by delegating most of the computation overhead on user to cloud service provider. The security and performance analysis show that our scheme is secure and efficient.