Identity-based access control for digital content based on ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption

Digital content is easily spread out in the era of cloud computing. However, the challenge is providing an identity-based access control mechanism to carry out the rating system for preventing specific digital content from being obtained by inappropriate users. In this paper, we proposed a novel identity-based access control approach for digital content based on ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (iDAC). In iDAC, the access control still works even the digital content is duplicated to another content server. Moreover, only one copy of encrypted digital content is required to share with multiple users. This could efficiently reduce the overhead of content servers. As shown in our performance analysis with respect of security, space complexity, and time complexity, iDAC outperforms the traditional access control list based and encryption-based access control approaches.