Fine-grained and heterogeneous proxy re-encryption for secure cloud storage

Cloud is an emerging computing paradigm. It has drawn extensive attention from both academia and industry. But its security issues have been considered as a critical obstacle in its rapid development. When data owners store their data as plaintext in cloud, they lose the security of their cloud data due to the arbitrary accessibility, specially accessed by the un-trusted cloud. In order to protect the confidentiality of data owners’ cloud data, a promising idea is to encrypt data by data owners before storing them in cloud. However, the straightforward employment of the traditional encryption algorithms can not solve the problem well, since it is hard for data owners to manage their private keys, if they want to securely share their cloud data with others in a fine-grained manner. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained and heterogeneous proxy re-encryption (FH-PRE) system to protect the confidentiality of data owners’ cloud data. By applying the FH-PRE system in cloud, data owners’ cloud data can be securely stored in cloud and shared in a fine-grained manner. Moreover, the heterogeneity support makes our FH-PRE system more efficient than the previous work. Additionally, it provides the secure data sharing between two heterogeneous cloud systems, which are equipped with different cryptographic primitives.