Design and Analysis of a Fine-Grained Two-Factor Access Control for Web-Based Cloud Computing Services

Abstract

In current day’s cloud computing has become one of the fascinating domains which are used by almost all MNC and IT companies. Generally this is formed by interconnecting a large number of systems connected all together for remote servers hosted on internet to store, access, retrieve data from remote machines not from local machines. As the cloud server has the capability to store a lot of valuable data on its memory block, a lot of users can connect with the centralized location to access, retrieve and modify the data which is stored on the cloud server. Till now there was no mechanism available to store the data in an encrypted manner in all public clouds and even private clouds. In this paper, we introduce a new fine-grained two-factor authentication (2FA) access control system for web-based cloud computing services. Specifically, in our proposed 2FA access control system, an attribute-based access control mechanism is implemented with the necessity of both a user secret key and a lightweight security device. As a user cannot access the system if they do not hold both, the mechanism can enhance the security of the system, especially in those scenarios where many users share the same computer for web-based cloud services. In addition, attribute-based control in the system also enables the cloud server to restrict the access to those users with the same set of attributes while preserving user privacy, i.e., the cloud server only knows that the user fulfills the required predicate, but has no idea on the exact identity of the user. Finally, we also carry out a simulation to demonstrate the practicability of our proposed 2FA system.