A Distributed Publisher-Driven Secure Data Sharing Scheme for Information-Centric IoT

Abstract

In Information-Centric Internet of Things (ICIoT), Internet of Things (IoT) data can be cached throughout a network for close data copy retrievals. Such a distributed data caching environment, however, poses a challenge to flexible authorization in the network. To address this challenge, Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) has been identified as a promising approach. However, in the existing CP-ABE scheme, publishers need to retrieve attributes from a centralized server for encrypting data, which leads to high communication overhead. To solve this problem, we incorporate CP-ABE and propose a novel Distributed Publisher-Driven secure data sharing for ICIoT (DPD-ICIoT) to enable only authorized users to retrieve IoT data from distributed cache. In DPD-ICIoT, newly introduced attribute manifest is cached in the network, through which publishers can retrieve the attributes from nearby copy holders instead of a centralized attribute server. In addition, a key chain mechanism is utilized for efficient cryptographic operations, and an automatic attribute self-update mechanism is proposed to enable fast updates of attributes without querying centralized servers. According to the performance evaluation, DPD-ICIoT achieves lower bandwidth cost compared to the existing CP-ABE scheme.