Issues and Challenges in Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption for Secure Cloud Storage

Abstract

The rapid growth of cloud computing has revolutionized data storage, offering significant benefits in terms of scalability and accessibility. However, these advantages come with critical security challenges, particularly in ensuring data confidentiality and access control. Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) has emerged as a promising solution to these challenges. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the key issues associated with CP-ABE in cloud storage, focusing on ciphertext size, multi-authority architecture, user revocation, and access policy hiding. Through an extensive literature review spanning studies from 2015 to 2023, we identify current solutions and highlight their limitations. Our analysis reveals that while significant progress has been made in reducing ciphertext size and improving multi-authority systems, challenges remain in efficient user revocation and robust access policy hiding. Key results indicate that hybrid encryption techniques and dynamic policy updates are effective in addressing some of these issues. The implications of our findings suggest that future research should focus on enhancing these techniques and developing more integrated approaches to overcome the persistent challenges in CP-ABE, thereby improving the security and efficiency of cloud storage systems.