A Survey of State-of-the-Art Multi-Authority Attribute Based Encryption Schemes in Cloud Environment

Abstract

Cloud computing offers a platform that is both adaptable and scalable, making it ideal for outsourcing data for sharing. Various organizations outsource their data on cloud storage servers for availing management and sharing services. When the organizations outsource the data, they lose direct control on the data. This raises the privacy and security concerns. Cryptographic encryption methods can secure the data from the intruders as well as cloud service providers. Data owners may also specify access control policies such that only the users, who satisfy the policies, can access the data. Attribute based access control techniques are more suitable for the cloud environment as they cover large number of users coming from various domains. Multi-authority attribute-based encryption (MA-ABE) technique is one of the propitious attribute based access control technique, which allows data owner to enforce access policies on encrypted data. The main aim of this paper is to comprehensively survey various state-of-the-art MA-ABE schemes to explore different features such as attribute and key management techniques, access policy structure and its expressiveness, revocation of access rights, policy updating techniques, privacy preservation techniques, fast decryption and computation outsourcing, proxy re-encryption etc. Moreover, the paper presents feature-wise comparison of all the pertinent schemes in the field. Finally, some research challenges and directions are summarized that need to be addressed in near future.