An Efficient Pairing-Free Certificateless Searchable Public Key Encryption for Cloud-Based IIoT

Abstract

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), as a special form of Internet of Things (IoT), has great potential in realizing intelligent transformation and industrial resource utilization. However, there are security and privacy concerns about industrial data, which is shared on an open channel via sensor devices. To address these issues, many searchable encryption schemes have been presented to provide both data privacy-protection and data searchability. However, due to the use of expensive pairing operations, most previous schemes were inefficient. Recently, a certificateless searchable public-key encryption (CLSPE) scheme was designed by Lu et al. to remove the pairing operation. Unfortunately, we find that Lu et al.’s scheme is vulnerable to user impersonation attacks. To enhance the security, a new pairing-free dual-server CLSPE (DS-CLSPE) scheme for cloud-based IIoT deployment is designed in this paper. In addition, we provide security and efficiency analysis for DS-CLSPE. The analysis results show that DS-CLSPE can resist chosen keyword attacks (CKA) and has better efficiency than other related schemes.