Secure multi-dimensional data retrieval with access control and range query in the cloud

Outsourcing data to the cloud offers various advantages, such as improved reliability, enhanced flexibility, accelerated deployment, and so on. However, data security concerns arise due to potential threats such as malicious attacks and internal misuse of privileges, resulting in data leakage. Data encryption is a recognized solution to address these issues and ensure data confidentiality even in the event of a breach. However, encrypted data presents challenges for common operations like access control and range queries. To address these challenges, this paper proposes Secure Multi-dimensional Data Retrieval with Access Control and Range Search in the Cloud (SMDR). In this paper, we propose SMDR policy, which supports both access control and range queries. The design of the SMDR policy cleverly utilizes the minimum and maximum points of buckets, enabling the SMDR policy is highly appropriate for supporting range queries on multi-dimensional data. Additionally, we have made modifications to Ciphertext Policy-Attribute Based Encryption (CP-ABE) to enable effective integration with the SMDR policy, and then constructed a secure index using the SMDR policy and CP-ABE. By utilizing the secure index, access control and range queries can be effectively supported over the encrypted multi-dimensional data. To evaluate the efficiency of SMDR, extensive experiments have been conducted. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and suitability of SMDR in handling encrypted multi-dimensional data. Additionally, we provide a detailed security analysis of SMDR.