An improved attribute-based encryption technique towards the data security in cloud computing

With the rapid development of the Internet, resource and knowledge sharing are two major problems experienced due to the presence of many hackers and malicious users. In this paper, an efficient and secure access control model has been proposed for the cloud computing environment for resource and knowledge sharing by using attribute-based encryption (ABE), distributed hash table (DHT) network, and identity-based timed-release encryption (IDTRE). Here, at first, data or resources are encrypted by using the attributes of users, and encrypted data are divided into the encapsulated ciphertext and extracted ciphertext. Then, IDTRE algorithm has been used to encrypt the decryption key and combined the ciphertext of the key with the extracted ciphertext for creating the ciphertext shares. At last, the ciphertext shares are distributed into the DHT network, and encapsulated ciphertext are stored on the cloud servers. Both the performance and security analysis show the proficiency of the proposed scheme over the existing schemes in a cloud environment.