Comparison-based encryption for fine-grained access control in clouds

Access control is one of the most important security mechanisms in cloud computing. However, there has been little work that explores various comparison-based constraints for regulating data access in clouds. In this paper, we present an innovative comparison-based encryption scheme to facilitate fine-grained access control in cloud computing. By means of forward/backward derivation functions, we introduce comparison relation into attribute-based encryption to implement various range constraints on integer attributes, such as temporal and level attributes. Then, we present a new cryptosystem with dual decryption to reduce computational overheads on cloud clients, where the majority of decryption operations are executed in cloud servers. We also prove the security strength of our proposed scheme, and our experiment results demonstrate the efficiency of our methodology.