LABAC: A Location-Aware Attribute-Based Access Control Scheme for Cloud Storage

Data access control is a challenging issue in cloud storage. Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-based Encryption (CP-ABE) is a potential cryptographic technique to address the above issue, which is able to enforce data access control based on users' permanent characteristics. However, in some scenarios, access policies are associated with users' temporary conditions (such as access time and location) as well as their permanent ones. CP-ABE cannot deal with such situations commendably. In this paper, we focus on the scenario where users' access privilege is determined by their attributes, together with their locations. To cope with this data access control requirement, we propose a location-aware attribute-based access control mechanism (LABAC) for cloud. In LABAC, we uniquely integrate CP-ABE with location trapdoors to make up access policies. In this way, data owners can flexibly combine both users' attributes and locations to implement a fine-grained control of their data. A competitive advantage of LABAC is that it requires no any additional revocation mechanisms to revoke location-aware access privilege when user location changes. Security and performance analysis are presented which show the security and efficiency of LABAC for practical implementations.