EFADS: Efficient, flexible and anonymous data sharing protocol for cloud computing with proxy re-encryption

•We figure out the four desired properties of cloud storage.•We propose a new cloud storage protocol satisfying the desired properties.•The new proxy re-encryption scheme may be independent of interests.

The concept of cloud computing has emerged as the next generation of computing infrastructure to reduce the costs associated with the management of hardware and software resources. It is vital to its success that cloud computing is featured efficient, flexible and secure characteristics. In this paper, we propose an efficient and anonymous data sharing protocol with flexible sharing style, named EFADS, for outsourcing data onto the cloud. Through formal security analysis, we demonstrate that EFADS provides data confidentiality and data sharer's anonymity without requiring any fully-trusted party. From experimental results, we show that EFADS is more efficient than existing competing approaches. Furthermore, the proxy re-encryption scheme we propose in this paper may be independent of interests, i.e., compared to those previously reported proxy re-encryption schemes, the proposed scheme is the first pairing-free, anonymous and unidirectional proxy re-encryption scheme in the standard model.