A Practical Client Application Based on Attribute-based Access Control for Untrusted Cloud Storage

One of widely used cryptographic primitives for the cloud application is Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) where users can have their own attributes and a ciphertext encrypted by an access policy. Though ABE provides many benefits, the novelty often only exists in an academic world and it is often difficult to find a practical use of ABE for a real application. In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of a cloud storage client application which supports the concept of ABE. Our proposed client provides an effective access control mechanism where it allows different types of access policy to be defined thus allowing large datasets to be shared by multiple users. Using different access policy, each user only needs to access only a small part of the big data. The goal of our experiment is to explore the right set of strategies for developing a practical ABE-based system. Through the implementation and evaluation, we have determined the various characteristics and issues associated with developing a practical ABEbased application.