Abstract—An increasing number of applications have been proposed and discussed on the cloud computing environment because it can bring many benefits like reducing the cost of maintaining data centers in an enterprise, low data management cost and retrieval of data whenever you want, etc. As more and more sensitive information and personal data are centralized into the cloud servers, how to protect data privacy and combat the unauthorized accesses is an important issue in the cloud computing environment since the outsourcing-service server may not be fully trusted. One method to alleviate the security worries is storing data in the encrypted form. The drawback of the encrypted data is the limitation of usability. The keyword search encryption technique has been proposed to solve the query limitation for the encrypted data; however, most of the researches focus on processing an individual user request. The proposed approach combines the fine-grained access control and keyword search encryption to provide multiple users’ access controls in the cloud environment with encrypted data protection. The user in this situation can retrieve the data file from the cloud database only if she/he gives appropriate keywords and presents the identity or position that satisfies the rules of the access rights.

Index Terms—Cloud computing, keyword search encryption, hidden vector encryption, fine-grained access control.

The authors are with the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chiayi University, Chiayi City 60004, Taiwan (e-mail: wangch@mail.ncyu.edu.tw, s1000422@mail.ncyu.edu.tw).

Cite:Chih Hung Wang and Chia-Chun Hsu, "Integration of Hierarchical Access Control and Keyword Search Encryption in Cloud Computing Environment," International Journal of Computer and Communication Engineering vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 333-337, 2013.