An Efficient Attribute-Based Encryption Scheme with Data Security Classification in the Multi-Cloud Environment

As an increasing number of people and corporations move their data to the cloud side, how to ensure efficient and secure access to data stored on the cloud side has become a key focus of current research. Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) is largely recognized as the best access control method for safeguarding the cloud storage environment, and numerous solutions based on ABE have been developed successively. However, the majority of current research is conducted within a single cloud provider, and only the limited number of schemes for the multi-cloud environment also fail to support the data security classification on the cloud side. Therefore, we propose an efficient attribute-based encryption scheme with data security classification in the multi-cloud environment. In our scheme, the data owner’s data are divided into two security levels and stored in different cloud providers, which improves the security of outsourcing data. Moreover, based on Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE), our scheme can not only provide a fine-grained access control for the data user, but also completely exploit the cloud side to facilitate outsourcing decryption to lighten the data user’s computing load. The security analysis showed that our scheme is effective against selective-attribute plaintext attack, as well as protects the privacy of the data. The experimental results also demonstrated that the computational overhead is obviously less than other existing schemes.