An ECC-based mutual data access control protocol for next-generation public cloud

Abstract

Through the broad usage of cloud computing and the extensive utilization of next-generation public clouds, people can share valuable information worldwide via a wireless medium. Public cloud computing is used in various domains where thousands of applications are connected and generate numerous amounts of data stored on the cloud servers via an open network channel. However, open transmission is vulnerable to several threats, and its security and privacy are still a big challenge. Some proposed security solutions for protecting next-generation public cloud environments are in the literature. However, these methods may not be suitable for a wide range of applications in a next-generation public cloud environment due to their high computing and communication overheads because if security protocol is strengthened, it inversely impacts performance and vice versa. Furthermore, these security frameworks are vulnerable to several attacks, such as replay, denial-of-service (DoS), insider, server spoofing, and masquerade, and also lack strong user anonymity and privacy protection for the end user. Therefore, this study aims to design an elliptic curve cryptographic (ECC) based data access control protocol for a public cloud environment. The security mechanism of the proposed protocol can be verified using BAN (Burrows-Abadi-Needham) logic and ProVerif 2.03, as well as informally using assumptions and pragmatic illustration. In contrast, in the performance analysis section, we have considered the parameters such as the complexity of storage overheads, communication, and computation time. As per the numerical results obtained in the performance analysis section, the proposed protocol is lightweight, robust, and easily implemented in a practical next-generation cloud computing environment.