An attribute-based lightweight cloud data access control using hypergraph structure

Cloud file storage systems are the current trend of enterprises and also of individual users. Due to the malicious or unauthorized users, file sharing among the cloud users has become the biggest challenge in the recent times. Attribute-based signcryption (ABSC) is known as the versatile cryptographic primitive which achieves the fine-grained access control over robust cloud storage. ABSC combines attribute-based encryption (ABE) and attribute-based signatures to achieve privacy-oriented confidentiality along with the authenticity. Unfortunately, most of the present ABE and ABSC schemes leverage heavy computational overheads against the key length, the ciphertext size or the expressive access structures used. In this paper, a new ABSC scheme is devised to reduce computational overheads, more particularly, at cloud by introducing the more expressive hypergraph access structure, Attribute HyperGraph. On a positive note, the proposed system outperforms and shows less cloud computational timing without exponentiations unlike Deng et al. (IEEE Access 6:39473–39486, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2843778), Liu et al. (Future Gener Comput Syst 52:67–76, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2014.10.014) and Li et al. (IEEE Trans Parallel Distrib Syst 25(8):2201–2210, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPDS.2013.271) schemes. Subsequently, the system does not incur any cryptographic computations associated with designcryption at cloud unlike Deng et al. (2018).