An Attribute-Based Assured Deletion Scheme in Cloud Computing

With the rapid development of cloud computing, it has been increasingly attractive for individuals and groups to store and share data via cloud storage. Once stored in the third-party cloud storage service providers, the privacy and integrity of outsourced data should be attached with more attention as a challenging task. This article presents the attribute-based assured deletion scheme (AADS) which aims to protect and assuredly delete outsourced data in cloud computing. It encrypts outsourced data files with standard cryptographic techniques to guarantee the privacy and integrity, and assuredly deletes data upon revocations of attributes. AADS could be applied to solve important security problems by supporting fine-grained attribute-based policies and their combinations. According to the comparison and analysis, AADS provides efficient data encryption and flexible attribute-based assured deletion for cloud-stored data with an acceptable concession in performance cost.