A Survey on Attribute-Based Encryption Schemes of Access Control in Cloud Environments

In Attribute-based Encryption (ABE) scheme, attributes play a very important role. Attributes have been exploited to generate a public key for encrypting data and have been used as an access policy to control users' access. The access policy can be categorized as either key-policy or ciphertext-policy. The key-policy is the access structure on the user's private key, and the ciphertext-policy is the access structure on the ciphertext. And the access structure can also be categorized as either monotonic or non-monotonic one. Using ABE schemes can have the advantages: (1) to reduce the communication overhead of the Internet, and (2) to provide a fine-grained access control. In this paper, we survey a basic attribute-based encryption scheme, two various access policy attribute-based encryption schemes, and two various access structures, which are analyzed for cloud environments. Finally, we list the comparisons of these schemes by some criteria for cloud environments.