SeDaSC: Secure Data Sharing in Clouds

Cloud storage is an application of clouds that liberates organizations from establishing in-house data storage systems. However, cloud storage gives rise to security concerns. In case of group-shared data, the data face both cloud-specific and conventional insider threats. Secure data sharing among a group that counters insider threats of legitimate yet malicious users is an important research issue. In this paper, we propose the Secure Data Sharing in Clouds (SeDaSC) methodology that provides: 1) data confidentiality and integrity; 2) access control; 3) data sharing (forwarding) without using compute-intensive reencryption; 4) insider threat security; and 5) forward and backward access control. The SeDaSC methodology encrypts a file with a single encryption key. Two different key shares for each of the users are generated, with the user only getting one share. The possession of a single share of a key allows the SeDaSC methodology to counter the insider threats. The other key share is stored by a trusted third party, which is called the cryptographic server. The SeDaSC methodology is applicable to conventional and mobile cloud computing environments. We implement a working prototype of the SeDaSC methodology and evaluate its performance based on the time consumed during various operations. We formally verify the working of SeDaSC by using high-level Petri nets, the Satisfiability Modulo Theories Library, and a Z3 solver. The results proved to be encouraging and show that SeDaSC has the potential to be effectively used for secure data sharing in the cloud.