Proactive user-centric secure data scheme using attribute-based semantic access controls for mobile clouds in financial industry

As one of the most significant issues in the financial industry, customers’ privacy information protection has been considered a challenging research over years. The constant emergence of the novel technologies often leads to dynamic threats from both internal and external service providers. We consider the implementations of mobile cloud-based financial services an important approach of service provisions, which also causes risks to privacy protections due to the data sharing with the unknown third parties. The data generated by mobility are usually associated with mobile users’ personal privacy information. This paper addresses this issue and proposes an approach proactively protect financial customers’ privacy information using Attributed-Based Access Control (ABAC) as well as data self-deterministic scheme. The proposed approach is called Proactive Dynamic Secure Data Scheme (P2DS), which aims to guarantee the unanticipated parties cannot reach the privacy data. There are two main algorithms supporting the proposed scheme, which are Attribute-based Semantic Access Control (A-SAC) Algorithm and Proactive Determinative Access (PDA) Algorithm. The main contributions of this paper have three aspects. First, we propose a semantic approach for constraining data accesses. Second, we propose a user-centric approach that proactively prevents users’ data from unexpected operations on the cloud side. Finally, the proposed scheme has a higher-level secure sustainability since it can deal with dynamic threats, including the emerging and future hazards. We have examined that our proposed scheme had a quality performance matching our expected goal.