Load-balanced attribute-based outsourced encryption for constrained IoT devices

• Published in: Computers & electrical engineering Vol. 118; p. 109424
• Main Authors: Gasmi, Meriem, Kerdoudi, Mohamed Lamine, Bachir, Abdelmalik
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 01-09-2024
• Subjects: CP-ABE; Fine access control; IoT; Load-balancing; Outsourced ABE; Security; Fine access control; Outsourced ABE; Security; Load-balancing; CP-ABE; IoT
• ISSN: 0045-7906
• DOI: 10.1016/j.compeleceng.2024.109424

The Internet of Things (IoTs) is based on physical sensors that collect data and transfer it to remote cloud computing platforms for processing and storage. Healthcare applications are one of the very promising areas where IoTs are expected to achieve significant advances. Indeed, devices can be installed in patients’ bodies to monitor vital signals and send the data to the cloud for storage, processing, and decision-making. In this work, we focus on the security aspect, particularly the confidentiality and access control of the data (for instance EMR) during transmission and later after the data is stored in the cloud. However, Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) is considered the most convenient for the accomplishment of fine access control. In fact, the current CP-ABE solutions are not efficient and suitable for use in the context of IoTs, as things that usually the data producers are very constrained and thus cannot perform the public-key cryptographic functions used by CP-ABE. In this paper, we propose to improve the standard CP-ABE to make it more convenient for constrained sensors by offloading the heavy encryption computation to multiple cooperative nodes. Ensuring a balanced distribution of workload between multiple sensors and multiple cooperative nodes. We based on the assistant nodes’ capacity for the best workload distribution. We evaluated our proposal through a set of experiments. The obtained results show that our approach, compared to the existing outsourcing ABE solutions, improves computation time and energy consumption, ensures data confidentiality, and provides fine-grained access control.