Encrypted data sharing with multi-owner based on digital rights management in online social networks

The online social networks (OSNs) offer attractive means for social interactions and data sharing, as well as raise a number of security and privacy issues. Although current solutions propose to encrypt data before sharing, the access control of encrypted data has become a challenging task. Moreover, multiple owners may enforce different access policy to the same data because of their different privacy concerns. A digital rights management (DRM) scheme is proposed for encrypted data in OSNs. In order to protect users' sensitive data, the scheme allows users outsource encrypted data to the OSNs service provider for sharing and customize the access policy of their data based on ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption. Furthermore, the scheme presents a multiparty access control model based on identity-based broadcast encryption and ciphertext-policy attribute-based proxy re-encryption, which enables multiple owners, such as tagged users who appear in a single data, customize the access policy collaboratively, and also allows the disseminators update the access policy if their attributes satisfy the existing access policy. Security analysis and comparison indicate that the proposed scheme is secure and efficient.