Fortifying Public Safety: A Dynamic Role-Based Access Control Paradigm for Cloud-Centric IoT

The evolution of communication technologies, exemplified by the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing, has significantly enhanced the speed and accessibility of Public Safety (PS) services, critical to ensuring the safety and security of our environment. However, these advancements also introduce inherent security and privacy challenges. In response, this research presents a novel and adaptable access control scheme tailored to PS services in cloud-supported IoT environments. Our proposed access control protocol leverages the strengths of Key Policy Attribute Based Encryption (KP-ABE) and Identity-Based Broadcast Encryption (IDBB), combining them to establish a robust security framework for cloud-supported IoT in the context of PS services. Through the implementation of an Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) scheme between entities, we ensure entity authentication, data confidentiality, and integrity, addressing fundamental security requirements. A noteworthy aspect of our lightweight protocol is the delegation of user private key generation within the KP-ABE scheme to an untrusted cloud entity. This strategic offloading of computational and communication overhead preserves data privacy, as the cloud is precluded from accessing sensitive information. To achieve this, we employ an IDBB scheme to generate secret private keys for system users based on their roles, requiring the logical conjunction ('AND') of user attributes to access data. This architecture effectively conceals user identities from the cloud service provider. Comprehensive analysis validates the efficacy of the proposed protocol, confirming its ability to ensure system security and availability within acceptable parameters

Efficient Ciphertext-policy Attribute Based Encryption for Cloud-Based Access Control

Outsourcing data to some cloud servers enables a massive, flexible usage of cloud computing resources and it is typically held by different organizations and data owners. However, various security concerns have been raised due to hosting sensitive data on an untrusted cloud environment, and the control over such data by their owners is lost after uploading to the cloud. Access control is the first defensive line that forbids unauthorized access to the stored data. Moreover, fine-grained access control on the untrusted cloud can be enforced using advanced cryptographic mechanisms. Some schemes have been proposed to deliver such access control using Ciphertext-policy attribute based encryption (CP-ABE) that can enforce data owners’ access policies to achieve such cryptographic access control and tackle the majority of those concerns. However, some challenges are still outstanding due to the complexity of frequently changing the cryptographic enforcements of the owners’ access policies in the hosted cloud data files, which poses computational and communicational overheads to data owners. These challenges are: 1) making dynamic decisions to grant access rights to the cloud resources, 2) solving the issue of the revocation process that is considered as a performance killer, and 3) building a collusion resistant system. The aim of our work is to construct an access control scheme that provides secure storing and sharing sensitive data on the cloud and suits limited-resources devices. In this thesis, we analyse some of the existing, related issues and propose a scheme that extends the relevant existing techniques to resolve the inherent problems in CP-ABE without incurring heavy computation overhead. In particular, most existing revocation techniques require re-issuing many private keys for all non-revoked users as well as re-encrypting the related ciphertexts. Our proposed scheme offers a solution to perform a novel technique that dynamically changes the access privileges of legitimate users. The scheme drives the access privileges in a specific way by updating the access policy and activating a user revocation property. Our technique assigns processing-intensive tasks to cloud servers without any information leakage to reduce the computation cost on resource-limited computing devices. Our analytical theoretical and experimental findings and comparisons of our work with related existing systems indicate that our scheme is efficient, secure and more practical compared to the current related systems, particularly in terms of policy updating and ciphertext re-encryption. Therefore, our proposed scheme is suited to Internet of Things (IoT) applications that need a practical, secure access control scheme. Moreover, to achieve secure, public cloud storage and minimise the limitations of CP-ABE which mainly supports storing data only on a private cloud storage system managed by only one single authority, our proposed access control scheme is extended to a secure, critical access control scheme with multiple authorities. This scheme ought to be carefully designed to achieve fine-grained access control and support outsourced-data confidentiality. In addition, most existing multi-authority access control schemes do not properly consider the revocation issue due to the difficulty of addressing it in distributed settings. Therefore, building a multi-authority CP-ABE scheme along with addressing changes to policy attributes and users, have motivated many researchers to develop more suitable schemes with limited success. By leveraging the existing work, in this thesis, we propose a second CP-ABE scheme that tackles most of the existing work’s limitations and allows storing data securely on a public cloud storage system by employing multiple authorities which manage a joint set of attributes. Furthermore, the proposed scheme efficiently maintains the revocation by adapting the two techniques used in the first proposed single authority access control scheme to allow dynamic policy update and invalidate a revoked user’s secret key that eliminates collusion attacks. In terms of computation overhead, the proposed multi-authority scheme outsources expensive operations of encryption and decryption to a cloud server to mitigate the burden on a data owner and data users, respectively. Our scheme analysis and the theoretical and implemented results demonstrate that our scheme is scalable and efficient

A fully distributed revocable ciphertext-policy hierarchical attribute-based encryption without pairing

Several appealing features of cloud computing such as cost-effectiveness and user-friendliness have made many users and enterprises interested to outsource their sensitive data for sharing via cloud. However, it causes many new challenges toward data confidentiality, access control , scalability, and flexibility. Ciphertext-policy Hierarchical attribute-based encryption (CP-HABE) can be a promising solution to the mentioned problems. But, the existing HABE schemes have several limitations in their key delegation and user revocation mechanisms. In this work, to solve these problems, we introduce the concept of \textit{fully distributed revocable } CP-HABE (FDR-CP-HABE) system and propose the first FDR-CP-HABE scheme. The proposed scheme provides a high level of flexibility and scalability in the key delegation and user revocation mechanisms. Moreover, our proposed system is pairing-free and realizes lightweight computing in decryption phase. Indeed, by exploiting the computational operation outsourcing technique, most of the operations have been done by the powerful cloud service provider and very few computations have been leaved to the data user. Also, in our scheme the storage cost on the data user side has been decreased, compared to the other similar works. Moreover, using the hardness assumption of Decisional Bilinear Diffie-Hellman (DBDH) problem, we show that the proposed scheme is adaptively semantically secure in the standard model

State of The Art and Hot Aspects in Cloud Data Storage Security

Along with the evolution of cloud computing and cloud storage towards matu- rity, researchers have analyzed an increasing range of cloud computing security aspects, data security being an important topic in this area. In this paper, we examine the state of the art in cloud storage security through an overview of selected peer reviewed publications. We address the question of defining cloud storage security and its different aspects, as well as enumerate the main vec- tors of attack on cloud storage. The reviewed papers present techniques for key management and controlled disclosure of encrypted data in cloud storage, while novel ideas regarding secure operations on encrypted data and methods for pro- tection of data in fully virtualized environments provide a glimpse of the toolbox available for securing cloud storage. Finally, new challenges such as emergent government regulation call for solutions to problems that did not receive enough attention in earlier stages of cloud computing, such as for example geographical location of data. The methods presented in the papers selected for this review represent only a small fraction of the wide research effort within cloud storage security. Nevertheless, they serve as an indication of the diversity of problems that are being addressed