Cost-effective anonymous data sharing with forward security using improved authentication

Abstract

Cloud computing gives customers instant access to a network of remote servers, networks, and data centres. Cloud computing makes data analysis helpful to society and individuals. Sharing data with many people causes efficiency, integrity, and privacy issues. Ring signatures may enable secure and anonymous data transfer. It anonymizes data verification for cloud-based analytics. Identity-based (ID) ring signatures are becoming popular alternatives to public key infrastructure (PKI)-based public-key encryption. PKI bottlenecks are certificate verification time and cost. ID-based ring signatures speed up certificate verification. We observed that encrypting ID-based ring signatures with a variation of SHA-384 and adding forward security considerably improves their security. Padding divides the input text into 512-byte blocks and adds the length as a 48-bit value to the hash in newer SHA versions. Signatures made before a user's secret key was compromised are legitimate. If a user's secret key is compromised, it's impossible to compel all data owners to re-verify their data, hence a large-scale data sharing system must contain this feature. We implement, secure, and prove our method's use. SHA-384 is safer for cloud-based anonymous data sharing.