An Attribute Credential Based Public Key Scheme for Fog Computing in Digital Manufacturing

Abstract

In order to meet low latency, service sensitive and location awareness requirements of digital manufacturing, fog computing is introduced to be an intermediate layer between industrial Internet of Things and cloud. The distributed, dynamic characteristics and the collaboration requirement make it face many new security and privacy issues that cannot be solved by the traditional public key or symmetric cryptosystem. For addressing them, a registered but anonymous attribute credential is designed to manage the network entities. Based on it, an attribute credential based public key cryptography (AC-PKC) is constructed to provide flexible key management by taking the advantage of the certificate-less public key cryptography and the combination property of the elliptic curve cryptography. Encryption, authentication, and access control with privacy preserving can be realized on the basic operations of AC-PKC, which can meet various security requirements of fog computing based digital manufacturing. The performance analyses and comparison with the existing public key schemes and attribute based encryption solutions show that the proposed scheme can work flexibly at a relatively low cost.