PU-ABE : lightweight attribute-based encryption supporting access policy update for cloud assisted IoT

Cloud-assisted IoT applications are gaining an expanding interest, such that IoT devices are deployed in different distributed environments to collect and outsource sensed data to remote servers for further processing and sharing among users. On the one hand, in several applications, collected data are extremely sensitive and need to be protected before outsourcing. Generally, encryption techniques are applied at the data producer side to protect data from adversaries as well as curious cloud provider. On the other hand, sharing data among users requires fine grained access control mechanisms. To ensure both requirements, Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) has been widely applied to ensure encrypted access control to outsourced data. Although, ABE ensures fine grained access control and data confidentiality, updates of used access policies after encryption and outsourcing of data remains an open challenge.

In this paper, we design PU-ABE, a new variant of key policy attribute based encryption supporting efficient access policy update that captures attributes addition to access policies. PUABE contributions are multifold. First, access policies involved in the encryption can be updated without requiring sharing secret keys between the cloud server and the data owners neither re-encrypting data. Second, PUABE ensures privacy preserving and fine grained access control to outsourced data. Third, ciphertexts received by the end-user are constant sized and independent from the number of attributes used in the access policy which affords low communication and storage costs.