Analysis of attribute-based cryptographic techniques and their application to protect cloud services

Recent technological advances such as the internet of things, fog computing, and cloud applications lead to exponential growth in the amount of generated data. Indeed, cloud storage services have experienced unprecedented usage demand. The loss of user control over their cloud stored data introduced several security and privacy concerns. To address these concerns, cryptographic techniques are widely adopted at the user side. Attribute-based cryptography is commonly used to provide encrypted and/or authenticated access to outsourced data in remote servers. However, the use of these cryptographic mechanisms often increase the storage and computation costs; consequently, the energy consumption in the entire cloud ecosystem. In this paper, we provide a comparative analysis of different attribute-based cryptographic mechanisms suitable for cloud data sharing services. We also provide a detailed discussion of different reviewed schemes, w.r.t. supported features, namely, security, privacy, and functional requirements. In addition, we explore the limitations of existing attribute-based cryptographic mechanisms and propose future research directions to better fit the growing needs of this cloud environment in terms of energy savings, processing and storage efficiency, and availability requirements.