Employing attribute-based encryption in systems with resource constrained devices in an information-centric networking context

Abstract

Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) is considered to be one of the most promising ways to be enforce access control in Information-Centric Networking (ICN). As the Internet of Things (IoT) is being considered as one of the primary use cases for ICN it raises the question of the compatibility between IoT and ABE. An important part of the IoT is the resource constrained devices, for them there is a challenge to perform the computationally expensive operations required for ABE. In this paper we consider ABE in sensor networks and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of a system solution where the ABE operations are performed on the sensors. To properly discuss these concerns we have implemented two ABE schemes, a Single-authority ABE (SA-CP-ABE) scheme and a Multi-authority ABE (MA-CP-ABE) scheme. Results regarding the execution time, RAM usage, data overhead and battery consumption of these implementations on a sensor are presented. We conclude that it is possible, already today, to perform ABE on sensors for smaller policies. The main limitation in deploying ABE in sensors is the RAM size of the sensors.