An Attribute-Based Searchable Encryption Scheme for Cloud-Assisted IIoT

Abstract

The searchable encryption is a particular case of structured encryption, which has been intensively researched in the secure cloud storage system. By constructing structured secure index such as encrypted multi-maps (EMM), encrypted inverted index (EII), etc., searchable encryption can achieve efficient keyword search over encrypted data set. However, existing searchable encryption constructions do not take search permissions into consideration, resulting in the lack of a mechanism of the data access control, which may not be suitable for IIoT applications, since an integrated industrial system contains all kinds of data with rigorous access permissions. In this paper, we construct an attribute-based searchable encryption construction for cloud-assisted IIoT application scenario. By designing the novel access policy based structured secure index and the attribute-based search token, our construction achieves fine-grained keyword search privilege control over encrypted IIoT data as well as the same search complexity as the traditional searchable encryption. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first Attribute-Based Searchable Encryption (ABSE) construction. We provide the correctness and security proofs for our construction. Experimental evaluation results in a real-world data set show the correctness and the practical search efficiency of the proposed ABSE.