A secure data sharing scheme with cheating detection based on Chaum-Pedersen protocol for cloud storage

With the development of cloud computing technology, data can be outsourced to the cloud and conveniently shared among users. However, in many circumstances, users may have concerns about the reliability and integrity of their data. It is crucial to provide data sharing services that satisfy these security requirements. We introduce a reliable and secure data sharing scheme, using the threshold secret sharing technique and the Chaum-Pedersen zero-knowledge proof. The proposed scheme is not only effective and flexible, but also able to achieve the semantic security property. Moreover, our scheme is capable of ensuring accountability of users' decryption keys as well as cheater identification if some users behave dishonestly. The efficiency analysis shows that the proposed scheme has a better performance in terms of computational cost, compared with the related work. It is particularly suitable for application to protect users' medical insurance data over the cloud.