An access control and authentication scheme for secure data sharing in the decentralized cloud storage system

Data privacy and data availability remain the major concern in centralized cloud storage, which could be handled effectively through the concept of decentralized data storage. However, the secrecy of data sharing is a rising concern in the decentralized data storage for which the effective access control and data sharing scheme, hash and session key-dependent attribute-based encryption (HS-ABE) is proposed in this research. Accordingly, the multi-level access control and sharing strategy authenticates the genuine requestors and assures access to the requestors upon the authentication of their attribute sets. In this perspective of access control and secure data sharing, Ethereum blockchain, decentralized Interplanetary File System (IPFS), HS-ABE are organized. The data owners (DOs) provide the secret attribute set for the requestors ensuring fine-grained access over the data. The performance of the developed HS-ABE scheme is investigated and compared with the conventional strategies, where the memory usage of the proposed scheme is 5812 Kbps, which proclaims a well-defined secure access control and authentication in the Blockchain-based cloud storage.