TMO: Time Domain Outsourcing Attribute-Based Encryption Scheme for Data Acquisition in Edge Computing

Abstract

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things and the ever-increasing demands of advanced services and applications, edge computing is proposed to move the computing and storage resources near the data source, which improves the response time and saves the bandwidth. However, due to the limited available resources and massive privacy-sensitive user data in edge nodes, there are huge challenges in data security and privacy protection in the edge computing environment. Hence, we propose an efficient time-domain multi-authority outsourcing attribute-based encryption (ABE) scheme (TMO) with a dynamic policy updating method for secure data acquisition and sharing in the edge computing. Specifically, considering that the time is a crucial factor in many real-world application scenarios, we add time-domain information in the encryption algorithm. Besides, to take full advantage of edge computing, TMO extends the multi-authority ABE approach by outsourcing the computation to edge nodes to enhance security and performance. Moreover, to tackle the mobility and frequently changing edge environment, TMO also provides an efficient online policy updating method to manage attribute information and to access policy with low overhead. The security analysis and the experimental results show that TMO can indeed efficiently enhance data security with low overhead in the edge computing environment.