FOR PRIVACY-AWARE ACCESS CONTROL POLICIES AND DATA SEARCH

Dedicated to my parents and brother along with his family. This work is for, and because of you. I love you all. Cloud computing is an epitome of on-demand and scalable computing which provides computa-tional power and storage capabilities on subscription basis, following the notion of pay-as-you-go. Numerous data storage services called public cloud storage services have emerged that changed the way we used to manage and interact with data outsourced to a public domain. With public cloud storage services, multiple subscribers can collaboratively work and share outsourced data without the concerns of data consistency, availability and reliability. Since, public cloud storage services are provisioned by an untrusted cloud service provider that lies beyond the federated domain of subscribers, there is a great risk of privacy infringement when confidential data is outsourced to such services. Besides this, malicious subscribers can collude with cloud service provider to compromise privacy of the outsourced data along with the personal information of subscribers. This is because public cloud storage services enable subscribers to share their outsourced data with multiple subscribers each having its own access privileges