Secure Cloud-Assisted Data Pub/Sub Service With Fine-Grained Bilateral Access Control

Abstract

Secure cloud-assisted data publish/subscribe (Pub/Sub) service provides an asynchronous method for publishers and subscribers to non-interactively exchange encrypted messages. Besides performing conjunctive subscription policy, numerous data Pub/Sub systems have recently been proposed to provide dynamic access control enforced from the publisher side to the subscriber side. However, these solutions fail to consider the following properties: (i) bilateral access control for both publishers and subscribers; (ii) the anonymity of the publisher; (iii) high matching time cost between publication and subscription. Therefore, we present P/S-BiAC, a secure and boolean cloud-assisted data Pub/Sub system with attribute-based bilateral access control that achieves authenticity and anonymity of publishers. In particular, P/S-BiAC enables cloud-based brokers to use the subscriber’s trapdoor to match published data with sub-linear time complexity. Technically, we introduce a “BiAC-and-Hidden” technique to refine publication tuples and trapdoor in classic searchable symmetric encryption solutions. Moreover, we implement P/S-BiAC and evaluate its practical performance based on Enron dataset in real cloud environment. To deal with a conjunctive subscription policy, P/S-BiAC runs 27.8× faster for matching time cost (with s-term=10) compared to state-of-the-art solutions, which demonstrates its feasibility in practical data Pub/Sub services with strong security properties.