Achieving lightweight, time-specific and secure access control in cloud storage

Cloud computing is regarded as a promising computing paradigm. More and more people store their sensitive data on the cloud. However, it is a great challenge for data security and accessing the sensitive data on the cloud. In this paper, we propose a novel access control scheme, termed LTS-ACCESS, which achieves Lightweight, Time-specific and Secure data access control for resource-limited devices in cloud storage. Our LTS-ACCESS simultaneously enjoys the following properties: i) constant size of the decryption keys and lower computation cost since we delegate almost all of the decryption cost to the decryption service provider, ii) time-specific, the sensitive data owner may specify a time interval, thus a receiver can decrypt the ciphertext once it is received and a time instant key has been obtained, and iii) provably secure, the proposed scheme is provably secure under the selective security model. Thoroughly theoretical analysis and performance evaluation indicate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed LTS-ACCESS.