Encrypted Data Management with Deduplication in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing plays an important role in supporting data storage, processing, and management in the Internet of Things (IoT). To preserve cloud data confidentiality and user privacy, cloud data are often stored in an encrypted form. However, duplicated data that are encrypted under different encryption schemes could be stored in the cloud, which greatly decreases the utilization rate of storage resources, especially for big data. Several data deduplication schemes have recently been proposed. However, most of them suffer from security weakness and lack of flexibility to support secure data access control. Therefore, few can be deployed in practice. This article proposes a scheme based on attribute-based encryption (ABE) to deduplicate encrypted data stored in the cloud while also supporting secure data access control. The authors evaluate the scheme's performance based on analysis and implementation. Results show the efficiency, effectiveness, and scalability of the scheme for potential practical deployment.