ELSA: A Keyword-based Searchable Encryption for Cloud-edge assisted Industrial Internet of Things

Abstract

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) plays a powerful role in smart manufacturing by performing real-time analysis for large volumes of data. In addition, IIoT systems can monitor several factors, such as data accuracy, network bandwidth and operations latency. To perform these operations securely and in a privacy-preserving manner, one solution is to use cryptographic primitives. However, most cryptographic solutions add performance overhead causing latency. In this paper, we propose an Edge Lightweight Searchable Attributebased encryption system (ELSA). ELSA leverages the cloudedge architecture to improve search time beyond the state-of-theart. The main contributions of this paper are as follows. First, we present an untrusted cloud/trusted edge architecture, which optimises the efficiency of data processing and decision making in the IIoT context. Second, we enhance search performance over current state-of-the-art (LSABE-MA) by an order of magnitude. We achieve this by improving the organisation of the data to provide better than linear search performance. We leverage the edge server to cluster data indices by keyword and introduce a query optimiser. The query optimiser uses k-means clustering to improve the efficiency of range queries, removing the need for linear search. In addition, we achieve this without sacrificing accuracy over the results.

ELSA: Edge Lightweight Searchable Attribute-based encryption Multi-keyword Scalability

“…However, LSABE-MA does not guarantee real-time interactions, nor does it investigate the impact on returned record accuracy or data bandwidth. Accuracy, bandwidth, and real-time guarantees are considered important criteria for industrial applications [8], [9], [21].…”

“…Depending on the location of the record the search time can introduce latency larger than the required real-time guarantees. Hence, ELSA [8] expanded LSABE-MA to address this deficiency in the searching method and associated time as well as the bandwidth utilised. ELSA improved performance by an order of magnitude.…”

“…The SE method however requires partial decryption on the 978-1-6654-2141-6/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE cloud; it makes assumptions regarding the ordering of the data, and associates data with sets of keywords. To address these challenges, we recently published the Edge Lightweight Searchable Attribute-based encryption (ELSA) [8] (Fig. 1); a keyword-based searchable encryption multi-authority (MA) access control (AC) for IIoT devices assisted by a three-tier edge computing architecture.…”

Blockchain-assisted multi-authority searchable encryption scheme in cloud environment

“…Li et al [10] put forward a joint multi-key searchable ABE method for e-health record(EHR) systems, in order to implement more precise access control and correlation keyword search functions. Aljabri et al [11] provided a lightweight searchable ABE system named ELSA that can cluster data indexes by keyword. The system is built on edge cloud framework and implements the clustering process through edge servers.…”