KA$^{2}$2SE: Key-Aggregation Authorized Searchable Encryption Scheme for Data Sharing in Wireless Sensor Networks

As a promising technology, key-aggregation searchable encryption with constant computation overhead is especially suitable for sensor nodes with limited computation resources in wireless sensor networks. However, in most of the existing key-aggregation searchable encryption schemes, the authorized aggregation key is generated in a deterministic way. As a result, these schemes suffer from “Key Forge Attack” and “Trapdoor Forge Attack” that we proposed and hence fail to support the security property as they claimed (which is an important goal to be achieved in key-aggregation searchable encryption schemes). To fix these flaws, in this paper, we identify the security challenges related to key-aggregation searchable encryption and propose a lightweight key-aggregation authorized searchable encryption scheme based on attribute-based encryption, called KA$^{2}$SE. It enables a data owner to share encrypted data with an authorized query user by issuing only a single authorized aggregation key, and the authorized query user only needs to submit a single trapdoor to the cloud server to perform keyword search. We formulate the security definitions for KA$^{2}$SE and prove its security. Finally, empirical evaluations demonstrate that KA$^{2}$ SE is computationally efficient in comparison with existing schemes.

I. Background

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is widely used in building e-healthcare, traffic management, social network, smart grid and various interconnected systems. Such interconnected systems store a large number of sensitive data. Due to the limitation of computation and storage capacity, sensor nodes usually upload these sensitive data to the base station or cloud server. However, the privacy of data needs to be considered, since these sensitive data are out of local management which makes it very convenient for any probabilistic polynomial-time (PPT) adversary to exploit the weakness and launch attacks on WSNs systems [3], [7], [9]. To prevent the cloud server from obtaining private information, these sensitive data collected by the sensor nodes are usually encrypted before uploading to the cloud server.