Sensors, Vol. 19, Pages 2817: A Secure and Efficient Digital-Data-Sharing System for Cloud Environments (Sensors)

“Education Cloud” is a cloud-computing application used in educational contexts to facilitate the use of comprehensive digital technologies and establish data-based learning environments. The immense amount of digital resources, data, and teaching materials involved in these environments must be stored in robust data-access systems. These systems must be equipped with effective security mechanisms to guarantee confidentiality and ensure the integrity of the cloud-computing environment. To minimize the potential risk of privacy exposure, digital sharing service providers must encrypt their digital resources, data, and teaching materials, and digital-resource owners must have complete control over what data or materials they share. In addition, the data in these systems must be accessible to e-learners. In other words, data-access systems should not only encrypt data, but also provide access control mechanisms by which users may access the data. In cloud environments, digital sharing systems no longer target single users, and the access control by numerous users may overload a system and increase management burden and complexity. This study addressed these challenges to create a system that preserves the benefits of combining digital sharing systems and cloud computing. A cloud-based and learner-centered access control mechanism suitable for multi-user digital sharing was developed. The proposed mechanism resolves the problems concerning multi-user access requests in cloud environments and dynamic updating in digital-sharing systems, thereby reducing the complexity of security management.