Offline/Online Outsourced Attribute-Based Encryption with Partial Policy Hidden for the Internet of Things

Abstract

In the Internet of Things (IoT) environment, the intelligent devices collect and share large-scale sensitive personal data for a wide range of application. However, the power of storage and computing of IoT devices is limited, so the mass perceived data will be encrypted and transmitted to a cloud platform-interconnected IoT devices. Therefore, the concern how to save the encryption/decryption cost and preserve the privacy of the sensitive data in IoT environment is an issue that deserves research. To mitigate these issues, an offline/online attribute-based encryption scheme that supports partial policy hidden and outsourcing decryption will be proposed. This scheme adopts offline/online attribute-based encryption algorithms; then, the key generation algorithm and encryption algorithm are divided into two stages: offline stage and online stage. Meanwhile, in order to solve the problem of policy disclosure under the cloud platform, the policy hidden is supported, that is, the attribute is divided into the attribute value and the attribute name. For the pairing operation involved in decryption process, a verifiable outsourced decryption is implemented. Our scheme is constructed based on composite bilinear groups, which meets full security under the standard model. Finally, by comparing with other schemes in terms of functionality and computational overhead, it is shown that the proposed scheme is more efficient and applicable to the mobile devices with limited computing and storage functions in the Internet of Things environment.