Lightweight Searchable Encryption Protocol for Industrial Internet of Things

Abstract

Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) has suffered from insufficient identity authentication and dynamic network topology, thereby resulting in vulnerabilities to data confidentiality. Recently, the attribute-based encryption (ABE) schemes have been regarded as a solution to ensure data transmission security and the fine-grained sharing of encrypted IoT data. However, most of existing ABE schemes that bring tremendous computational cost are not suitable for resource-constrained IoT devices. Therefore, lightweight and efficient data sharing and searching schemes suitable for IoT applications are of great importance. To this end, In this article, we propose a light searchable ABE scheme (namely LSABE). Our scheme can significantly reduce the computing cost of IoT devices with the provision of multiple-keyword searching for data users. Meanwhile, we extend the LSABE scheme to multiauthority scenarios so as to effectively generate and manage the public/secret keys in the distributed IoT environment. Finally, the experimental results demonstrate that our schemes can significantly maintain computational efficiency and save the computational cost at IoT devices, compared to other existing schemes.