A Secure and Lightweight Data Access Control Scheme for Mobile Cloud Computing

By moving data storage and processing from lightweight mobile devices to powerful and centralized computing platforms located in clouds, Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) can greatly enhance the capability of mobile devices. However, when data owners outsource sensitive data to mobile cloud for sharing, the data is outside of their trusted domain and can potentially be granted to untrusted parties which include the service providers. Data security and flexible access control have become the most pressing demands for MCC. To address this issue, we design a secure and lightweight data access control scheme based on Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-based Encryption (CP-ABE) algorithm, which can protect the confidentiality of outsourced data and provide fine-grained data access control in MCC. The scheme can obviously improve the overall system performance by greatly reducing the computation overheads in encryption and decryption operations, provide flexible and expressive data access control policy, and meanwhile enable data owners to securely outsource most of the computation overheads at mobile devices to cloud servers. The security and performance evaluation show that our scheme is secure, highly efficient and well suited for lightweight mobile devices.