Lightweight attribute-based encryption for the internet of things
Abstract
The large volume of data produced by the increasingly deployed Internet of Things (IoT), is shifting security priorities to consider data access control from a data-centric perspective. To secure the IoT, it becomes essential to implement a data access control solution that offers the necessary flexibility required to manage a large number of IoT devices. The concept of Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-based Encryption (CP-ABE) fulfills such requirement. It allows the data source to encrypt data while cryptographically enforcing a security access policy, whereby only authorized data users with the desired attributes are able to decrypt data. Yet, despite these manifest advantages; CPABE has not been designed taking into consideration energy efficiency. Many IoT devices, like sensors and actuators, cannot be part of CP-ABE enforcement points, because of their resource limitations in terms of CPU, memory, battery, etc. In this paper, we propose to extend the basic CP-ABE scheme using effective pre-computation techniques. We will experimentally compute the energy saving potential offered by the proposed variant of CPABE, and thus demonstrate the applicability of CP-ABE in the IoT.