Expressive Bilateral Access Control for Internet-of-Things in Cloud-Fog Computing

Abstract

As a versatile system architecture, cloud-fog Internet-of-Things~(IoT) enables multiple resource-constrained devices to communicate and collaborate with each other. By outsourcing local data and immigrating expensive workloads to cloud service providers and fog nodes (FNs), resource-constrained devices can enjoy data services with low latency and minimal cost. To protect data security and privacy in the untrusted cloud-fog environment, many cryptographic mechanisms have been invented. Unfortunately, most of them are impractical when directly applied to cloud-fog IoT computing, mainly due to the large number of resource-constrained end-devices (EDs). In this paper, we present a secure cloud-fog IoT data sharing system with bilateral access control based on a new cryptographic tool called lightweight matchmaking encryption. Our system enforces both sender access control and receiver access control simultaneously and adapts to resource-constrained EDs by outsourcing costly workloads to FNs. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the superior performance of our system to the most relevant solutions in the literature.