Flexible CP-ABE Based Access Control on Encrypted Data for Mobile Users in Hybrid Cloud System

In hybrid cloud computing, encrypted data access control can provide a fine-grained access method for organizations to enact policies closer to organizational policies. This paper presents an improved CP-ABE (ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption) scheme to construct an encrypted data access control solution that is suitable for mobile users in hybrid cloud system. In our improvement, we split the original decryption keys into a control key, a secret key and a set of transformation keys. The private cloud managed by the organization administrator takes charge of updating the transformation keys using the control key. It helps to handle the situation of flexible access management and attribute alteration. Meanwhile, the mobile user’s single secret key remains unchanged as well as the ciphertext even if the data user’s attribute has been revoked. In addition, we modify the access control list through adding the attributes with corresponding control key and transformation keys so as to manage user privileges depending upon the system version. Finally, the analysis shows that our scheme is secure, flexible and efficient to be applied in mobile hybrid cloud computing.