This document summarizes and reviews several research papers on providing anonymous authentication and access control for securely storing user data in the cloud. It discusses how traditional access control schemes used for clouds are centralized, while the proposed decentralized approach supports anonymous verification of user identities by the cloud before storing data, and only allows authorized users to decrypt stored information. The scheme prevents replay attacks and enables creation, modification and reading of stored data, while also addressing user revocation. Communication, computation and storage overhead are similar to centralized approaches. Attribute-based encryption techniques are explored that allow flexible access policies based on user attributes.