Traceable hierarchical attribute-based authentication for the cloud

When data owners store their data on cloud servers, they may want to define the access requirements themselves, where attribute-based authentication (ABA) can be a good choice for the solution. In this paper, we propose a traceable hierarchical ABA (HABA) solution which fits two situations in the cloud. The first situation is when cloud users are organized in groups of a hierarchical structure and the access allowance can only be granted to users in a specific group. The second situation is that attributes are organized in a hierarchical structure with different priorities, such that only users who own the required attributes of a specific priority can be authenticated and access the data. In this paper, we use “user-based” and “attributebased” hierarchy to describe these two situations respectively. Moreover, both HABA schemes are traceable.