Lightweight Attribute-based Encryption Supporting Access Policy Update for Cloud Assisted IoT

Abstract

Cloud-assisted IoT applications are gaining an expanding interest, such that IoT devices are deployed in different distributed environments to collect and outsource sensed data to remote servers for further processing and sharing among users. On the one hand, in several applications, collected data are extremely sensitive and need to be protected before outsourcing. Generally, encryption techniques are applied at the data producer side to protect data from adversaries as well as curious cloud provider. On the other hand, sharing data among users requires fine grained access control mechanisms. To ensure both requirements, Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) has been widely applied to ensure encrypted access control to outsourced data. Although, ABE ensures fine grained access control and data confidentiality, updates of used access policies after encryption and outsourcing of data remains an open challenge. In this paper, we design PU-ABE, a new variant of key policy attribute based encryption supporting efficient access policy update that captures attributes addition and revocation to access policies. PU-ABE contributions are multifold. First, access policies involved in the encryption can be updated without requiring sharing secret keys between the cloud server and the data owners neither re-encrypting data. Second, PU-ABE ensures privacy preserving and fine grained access control to outsourced data. Third, ciphertexts received by the end-user are constant sized and independent from the number of attributes used in the access policy which affords low communication and storage costs.

The Security of Big Data in Fog-Enabled IoT Applications Including Blockchain: A Survey

“…Salonikias et al [80] proposed a role-based authorization in traditional web services in which administrators have to regulate access rights. In [81], attribute-based encryption is proposed, in which predefined attributes of users must be satisfied [82,83]. However, there are open challenges related to multiple devices for predefined policies.…”

A Survey of IoT Security Based on a Layered Architecture of Sensing and Data Analysis

“…AES has been also adopted to provide secure communication between IoT devices [73]. Though an attribute-based encryption algorithm requires high computation costs, several lightweight versions have been designed to suit IoT applications, such as reduced computation algorithms [40,74], offloading heavy computations to an edge [75], or cloud server [26].…”

“…Since smart objects have a limited calculation capacity, restricted energy, and limited memory, lightweight encryption algorithms are widely used in the IoT field, such as in RFID tags, sensors, and healthcare devices [39]. Additionally, the lightweight concept for IoT is extended to lightweight attribute-based encryption schema for cloud applications [40][41][42], lightweight collaborative key management protocol [43], lightweight protocol for smart home authentication and key-session exchange [44,45]. Many IoT protocols have been proposed for different ISO layers, such as link layer (802.15.4, PLC), network layer (RPL, 6LoWPA), presentation layer (TLS, 802.1AR, 802.1X), and application layer (CoAP) [46].…”

Accountable privacy preserving attribute based framework for authenticated encrypted access in clouds

“…ABE schemes have been widely applied to secure outsourced data to distant cloud servers [24]. Although the proposed schemes achieves encrypted fine grained access control to data, they rely on a single authority to manage all the attributes used in the system and issue the related secret keys [25], [26], [27]. As such, the risk of key escrow attacks is arising, considering that all users' private keys are maintained by one single central entity.…”