A Privacy-Preserving Attribute-Based Authentication Scheme for Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a revolutionary information technology paradigm, which provides users with unlimited, scalable, low-cost and convenient resource services. Challenging security issues such as user privacy, access control, etc. still urgently need to be addressed. Authentication, as the first line of defence to guarantee cloud security, still faces great security and privacy challenges. Users' privacy is generally neglected during authentication. Some authentication solutions provide privacy preservation yet do not consider fine-grained access control. To solve this problem, existing authentication schemes applied bilinear pairing for authorized and fine-grained access to cloud data. However, efficiency is still an unsolved challenge for the bilinear pairing cryptography. To address the challenge, this paper proposes an efficient attribute-based authentication scheme. The proposed authentication scheme can achieve efficient fine-grained access control and privacy preservation as well. We conduct theoretical security analysis, and carry out experiments to prove that the proposed scheme has good performance in terms of computational, communication and storage overheads.