Empowering Data Owners: An Efficient and Verifiable Scheme for Secure Data Deletion

Zhenwu Xu, Xingshu Chen, Xiao Lan, Rui Tang, Shuyu Jiang, Changxiang Shen

Abstract: Highlights•Most encryption-based data deletion schemes involve many complex bilinear mapping operations, which are expensive for most devices. As far as the current research is concerned, our scheme is the most state-of-the-art, especially in terms of efficiency.•Efficient encryption scheme is implemented by encapsulating symmetric encryption key through simple scalar multiplication.•Accuracy and fine-grainedness of data deletion are achieved through the access control matrix in the ciphertext.•In order to implement an efficient verification algorithm, an efficient merkle tree is used to verify the deletion of data.•The proposed scheme makes most devices benefit from secure and verifiable data deletion technology (in other words, it can process or manage its own data by deleting it quickly and easily), thereby reducing the risk of data breaches.