Secure Authentication in Cloud Big Data with Hierarchical Attribute Authorization Structure

With the fast growing demands for the big data, we need to manage and store the big data in the cloud. Since the cloud is not fully trusted and it can be accessed by any users, the data in the cloud may face threats. In this paper, we propose a secure authentication protocol for cloud big data with a hierarchical attribute authorization structure. Our proposed protocol resorts to the tree-based signature to significantly improve the security of attribute authorization. To satisfy the big data requirements, we extend the proposed authentication protocol to support multiple levels in the hierarchical attribute authorization structure. Security analysis shows that our protocol can resist the forgery attack and replay attack. In addition, our protocol can preserve the entities privacy. Comparing with the previous studies, we can show that our protocol has lower computational and communication overhead.

1 Introduction

The concept of the big data has been widely concerned among researchers. Nowadays, utilizing the big data to obtain valuable information has become an important trend. The primary goal of the big data research is to process large amounts of data to obtain significant information. Furthermore, in a long-term perspective, an appropriate approach for the big data processing is very critical [1], [2]. However, it is unable to use a single computer or server to deal with the big data. Therefore, the distributed structure is particularly important in the construction of the big data. Cloud computing is evolved from the distributed computing, which can provide a lot of necessary services for the big data, including distributed processing, virtualization, distributed database and so on [3], [4].