###### Abstract
[PERSON] and [PERSON] [18] were the pioneers of Attribute-based Encryption (ABE), where they claimed that the fine-grained access control scheme was able to support better security services for Cloud users and CSPs. In ABE, different attributes of various Cloud environment entities, for example, data owner, file, and data recipient, are used to describe the encrypted data and built policies into the user's keys. Later, the authors of [19] introduced Ciphertext Policy ABE (CP-ABE), which uses attributes to describe a user's credentials, and a party encrypting data determines a policy for who can decrypt the ciphertext. Basically, in CP-ABE, the access policy created for the encrypted message is sent in a plaintext format. It provides the opportunity for illegal parties to retrieve the attribute details in the access policy, subsequently disclosing the data. Besides, several other issues related to CP-ABE have also been discussed in [20]. Thus, many researchers [6; 19; 21; 22] introduced new CP-ABE schemes to solve the issues. The authors of [18] introduced a CP-ABE scheme to enhance the efficiency of data sharing between data owners and other users. It also allowed data owners to define the access policy of the encrypted data so that only users who match the access policy can download and reveal the data. According to [6], most proposed CP-ABE schemes have accomplished their objectives by providing efficient and secure data sharing. However, most of these constructions disregard the privacy of data owners and data users. For instance, in the healthcare system (Figure 1), a doctor needs to share his patient's health record with other doctors. Based on the conventional method of CP-ABE, the nurses could also have access to cloud storage to obtain patient information from the attributes in the access policy. It is due to the access policy that is partially hidden and can be read by authorized entities, which might turn into malicious access. Hence, it is crucial to enforce the encryption scheme to not merely encrypt the message but entirely hide the access policy details. Therefore, inspired by the literature [23], we present a Policy Hiding using Logical Connective in CP-ABE (PHLC) scheme for Cloud storage, which adopts XOR operation to modify access policy information. This proposed work can overcome the encryption challenges outlined by [24] since it was designed to provide data confidentiality using a symmetric encryption scheme and offered fine-grained access control with data sharing provision. Besides, this scheme preserved users' privacy through an access policy hiding scheme. In addition, PHLC achieved efficient data storage utilization by using a pre-processing process to eliminate redundant data in raw shared data. This operation helps the scheme to reduce ciphertext size and decrease the computational overhead for the encryption process. Security analysis shows that the proposed scheme preserved Cloud users' privacy and guaranteed secure data sharing in cloud storage. Furthermore, we conducted an extensive simulation to demonstrate that PHLC CP-ABE was secure against passive attacks. The rest of the paper is arranged as follows. Section 2 discusses related work and Section 3 provides some preliminaries of CP-ABE, whereas Section 4 presents the proposed scheme's implementation. Section 5 discusses security analysis and Section 6 provides results and discussion. Finally, Section 7 concludes this study.