Access Control Aware Search on the Cloud Computing

The current trend towards outsourcing data to the Cloud Computing requires rigorous techniques to deal with data confidentiality. Encryption is one of the most secure techniques in use. However, it remains weak against some indiscretions, and presents incompleteness in the measures offered to ensure confidentiality. New flaws appear, inducing confidential information disclosure, despite a secure and rigorous data encryption. In this article, we propose to enhance the level of confidentiality that may already be guaranteed for outsourced data. We are particularly interested in access control on the result of the search over encrypted data. The property behind this aspect of security is known as ACAS (Access Control Aware Search) principle. We present an approach which integrates the access control mechanism with data encryption in order to comply with ACAS. The used techniques are based on Searchable Encryption and Attribute Based Encryption methods. The proposed model has been evaluated based on data size and access control complexity.