Authority revocation scheme for MA-CP-ABE-based secure communication in IoMT ecosystem

Abstract

The proliferation of the internet of medical things (IoMT) is proving to be a disruptive technology in contemporary healthcare. However, given the sensitivity of the nature of data being shared in this system security, and privacy are critical issues. Attribute-based encryption is a proactive technique for efficient one-to-many data sharing. Specifically, multi-authority-ciphertext policy-attribute-based encryption (MA-CP-ABE) is a suitable method given the multi-stakeholder ecosystem of IoMT-based healthcare. In this work, conventional MA-CP-ABE techniques have been modified to address several existing security limitations. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed work is first to address fault tolerance in MA-CP-ABE, without any redundancy at attribute authority's level and to develop a mechanism for full and partial revocation of compromised authority. A non-monotonic fully hidden access structure further enhances the security of the scheme while efficiently performing encryption/decryption operations even for a large number of attributes, making it suitable for the secure sharing of IoMT data.