A Practical Deployment Framework for Use of Attribute-Based Encryption in Data Protection

Data protection in cloud storage presents significant challenges. Attribute-based encryption (ABE) has been identified as a useful security mechanism for supporting data protection in untrusted environments. ABE enables fine-grained access control over encrypted data and allows individual data owners to define their own data access policy. However, important practical features such as efficient user revocation, key escrow avoidance, and key refreshing are not straightforward to incorporate into existing ABE schemes. In this paper we propose a generic practical deployment framework that can be applied to any ABE scheme in order to build-in these features.