A Survey on Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-based Encryption (CP-ABE) Approaches to Data Security on Mobile Devices and its Application to IoT

Abstract

The growth in Cloud Computing and the ubiquity of Mobile devices to access Cloud services has generated a new paradigm, Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC). While the benefits of storing and accessing data in the Cloud are well documented there are concerns relating to the security of such data through data corruption, theft, exploitation or deletion. Innovative encryption schemes have been developed to address the challenges of data protection in the Cloud and having greater control over who should be accessing what data, one of which is Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE). ABE is a type of role-based access control encryption solution which allows data owners and data consumers or users to encrypt and decrypt based on their personal attributes (e.g. department, location, gender, role). A number of ABE schemes have been developed over the years but ABE in MCC has established its own paradigm driven by a) the use of mobile devices to access private data hosted in the Cloud and b) the physical limitations of the mobile device to perform complex computation in support of encryption and decryption in ABE. ABE in MCC is an evolving research field but given the breadth and strength of interest at time of writing it is timely to perform a survey. Due to the sheer volume of research, the survey has focused on one aspect of ABE - Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption - in line with its prominence in ABE in MCC research to date. Further, given the significant developments and interest in IoT, the survey has since been extended to assess whether the research into mobile devices has been translated to the application of attribute-based encryption in IoT where the challenges to support complex computation and data transmission are potentially more complex given the much greater heterogeneity and resource restrictions of IoT devices.