An identity-based cryptographic scheme for cloud storage applications

The use of remote storage systems is gaining an expanding interest, namely the cloud storage-based services. In fact, one of the factors that led to the popularity of cloud computing is the availability of storage resources provided at a reduced cost. However, when outsourcing the data to a third party, security issues become critical concerns, especially confidentiality, integrity, authentication, anonymity and resiliency. Based on this challenge, this work provides a new approach to ensure authentication in cloud storage applications. ID-Based Cryptosystems (IBC) have many advantages over certificate-based systems, such as simplification of key management. This paper proposes an original ID-based authentication approach in which the cloud tenant is assigned the IBC-Private Key Generator (PKG) function. Consequently, it can issue public elements for its users, and can keep confidential resulting IBC secrets. Moreover, in our scheme, the public key infrastructure is still in usage to establish trust relationships between the PKGs.