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People endorse the great power of cloud computing, but cannot fully trust the cloud providers to host privacy-sensitive data, due to the absence of user-to-cloud controllability. To ensure confidentiality, data owners outsource encrypted data instead of plaintexts. To share the encrypted files with other users, ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) can be utilized to conduct fine-grained and owner-centric access control. But this does not sufficiently become secure against other attacks. Many previous schemes did not grant the cloud provider the capability to verify whether a downloader can decrypt. Therefore, these files should be available to everyone accessible to the cloud storage. A malicious attacker can download thousands of files to launch economic denial of sustainability (EDoS) attacks, which will largely consume the cloud resource. The payer of the cloud service bears the expense. Besides, the cloud provider serves both as the accountant and the payee of resource consumption fee, lacking the transparency to data owners. These concerns should be resolved in real-world public cloud storage. In this paper, we propose a solution to secure encrypted cloud storages from EDoS attacks and provide resource consumption accountability. It uses CP-ABE schemes in a black-box manner and complies with arbitrary access policy of the CP-ABE. We present two protocols for different settings, followed by performance and security analysis.
Xue et al. (Mon,) studied this question.