A Lightweight Secure Data Sharing Scheme for Mobile Cloud Computing

With the popularity of cloud computing, mobile devices can store/retrieve personal data from anywhere at any time. Consequently, the data security problem in mobile cloud becomes more and more severe and prevents further development of mobile cloud. There are substantial studies that have been conducted to improve the cloud security. However, most of them are not applicable for mobile cloud since mobile devices only have limited computing resources and power. Solutions with low computational overhead are in great need for mobile cloud applications. In this paper, we propose a lightweight data sharing scheme (LDSS) for mobile cloud computing. Proposing the novel concept of key aggregate searchable encryption (KASE) and instantiating the concept through a concrete KASE scheme. A data owner only needs to distribute a single key to a user for sharing a large number of documents. The user only needs to submit a single trapdoor to the cloud for querying the shared documents. The experimental results show that this method can effectively reduce the overhead on the mobile device side when users are sharing data in mobile cloud environments.