An approach is provided for managing data duplication in cloud computing. A method comprising, sending from a first device to a data center, data encrypted with a data encryption key for storing the encrypted data at the data center; encrypting the data encryption key according to an attribute-based encryption (ABE) scheme by using identity as an attribute in a deduplication policy for the data; issuing to a second device, a personalized secret attribute key which is derived from a public key of the second device according to the attribute-based encryption (ABE) scheme, wherein the personalized secret attribute key is to be used for decrypting the encrypted data encryption key at the second device, in combination with the policy.