CIPHERTEXT DESTRUCTION IN CLOUD STORAGE

Abstract

In cloud services, users will frequently be
required to reveal their personal sensitive
information which could be stored in the cloud
which is used for different purposes. However, in
a cloud storage network, the servers are easily
prone to strong attacks and also commonly
experience software/hardware faults. As such, the
private information could be under risk in an
untrusted environment. Given that the personal
sensitive information is usually out of user’s
control in most cloud-based services, ensuring
data security and privacy protection with respect
to untrusted storage network has become a
formidable challenge in research. To address
these challenges, in this paper we propose a selfdestruction
system, named Cloud Sky, which is
able to enforce the security of user privacy over
the untrusted cloud in a controllable way. Cloud
Sky exploits a key control mechanism based on
the attribute-based encryption (ABE) and takes
advantage of active storage networks to allow the
user to control the subjective life-cycle and the
access control polices of the private data whose
integrity is ensured by using HMAC to cope with
untrusted environments. The feasibility of the
system by its performance and scalability is
demonstrated by experiments on a large-scale
storage network.