Multiauthority CP-ABE-based Access Control Model for IoT-enabled Healthcare Infrastructure

Abstract

The exponential growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies requires high data security. Here, data security is very critical as all IoT devices transfer data over the Internet. The fine-grained access control provided by the ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) technique can be considered as a potential solution to this issue. However, most of the CP-ABE schemes use bilinear pairing operations for its internal working, which is expensive for any resource constraint device. An elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) based CP-ABE scheme can be well suited for resource constraint IoT framework because ECC takes less computational time. This article proposes a novel CP-ABE technique based on ECC to achieve fine-grained access control over data or resources. The proposed technique includes multiple attribute authorities to manage attributes and key generation, which can reduce the work overhead of having a single authority in traditional CP-ABE systems. In addition, the proposed scheme outsources the decryption process to a user assistant entity to reduce the decryption overhead of the end-users. To prove the efficiency of the proposed scheme, both formal security analysis and performance comparisons are presented in this article. The result and findings prove the effectiveness of the proposed scheme over some well-known schemes.