Flexible, Secure, and Reliable Data Sharing Service Based on Collaboration in Multicloud Environment

Abstract EN

Due to the abundant storage resources and high reliability data service of cloud computing, more individuals and enterprises are motivated to outsource their data to public cloud platform and enable legal data users to search and download what they need in the outsourced dataset.

However, in “Paid Data Sharing” model, some valuable data should be encrypted before outsourcing for protecting owner’s economic benefits, which is an obstacle for flexible application.

Specifically, if the owner does not know who (user) will download which data files in advance and even does not know the attributes of user, he/she has to either remain online all the time or import a trusted third party (TTP) to distribute the file decryption key to data user.

Obviously, making the owner always remain online is too inflexible, and wholly depending on the security of TTP is a potential risk.

In this paper, we propose a flexible, secure, and reliable data sharing scheme based on collaboration in multicloud environment.

For securely and instantly providing data sharing service even if the owner is offline and without TTP, we distribute all encrypted split data/key blocks together to multiple cloud service providers (CSPs), respectively.

An elaborate cryptographic protocol we designed helps the owner verify the correctness of data exchange bills, which is directly related to the owner’s economic benefits.

Besides, in order to support reliable data service, the erasure-correcting code technic is exploited for tolerating multiple failures among CSPs, and we offer a secure keyword search mechanism that makes the system more close to reality.

Extensive security analyses and experiments on real-world data show that our scheme is secure and efficient.