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1. Introduction
Cloud computing enables people to obtain their required resources – such as network, server, storage, application and service – from a shared pool of configurable computing resources anytime, anywhere, and on demand (Peng et al., 2016). It can minimize the overhead of resource management, and thus reduce the institutional investment in business operation and document management (Yoo and Kim, 2018). In recent years, government sectors in developed countries, such as the USA, the UK, and Australia, have launched the Cloud First strategy (Chen, 2017), resulting in an increasing proportion of formation and management of archives in cloud environments. Now, the management of archives based on cloud computing has become a major trend (Gao and Huang, 2018). However, cloud computing also results in many negative effects (Gao and Huang, 2018; Wu et al., 2018a), with the most important being that the archive data needs to be stored and managed by the cloud server, taking the archives out of the control of the owners, resulting in a serious threat to the security of privacy of the data in the archives. In general, the privacy threat includes two parts:
an external threat, that is, attacks from hackers to cloud service providers (Attasena et al., 2017); and
an internal threat, that is, threats from the cloud service provider’s staff (Wu et al., 2018a).
In short, for an archives management system, the cloud server is untrusted, thus the security of the archives in the cloud has become an important obstacle to the further application of cloud computing technologies in the management of digital archives. Therefore, for the promotion of archives management based on cloud computing, how to ensure the security of archives data stored in the untrusted cloud server has become an important problem which needs to be solved urgently.
XML is a famous extensible markup language, which has become an important data exchange standard (Calvanese et al., 2018). At present, in archives management systems, a large number of digital archives are organized and managed using XML (Post et al., 2014). Thus, in this paper, a privacy protection approach is proposed for XML-based archives management in a cloud environment. The basic idea of the proposed approach is that the privacy data has...