Security and privacy protection in cloud computing: Discussions and challenges

Abstract With the development of cloud computing, privacy security issues have become increasingly prominent, which is of concern to industry and academia. We review the research progress on privacy security issues from the perspective of several privacy security protection technologies in cloud computing. First, we introduce some privacy security risks of cloud computing and propose a comprehensive privacy security protection framework. Second, we show and discuss the research progress of several technologies, such as access control; ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE); key policy attribute-based encryption (KP-ABE); the fine-grain, multi-authority, revocation mechanism; the trace mechanism; proxy re-encryption (PRE); hierarchical encryption; searchable encryption (SE); and multi-tenant, trust, and a combination of multiple technologies, and then compare and analyze the characteristics and application scope of typical schemes. Last, we discuss current challenges and highlight possible future research directions.