Lightweight Searchable Encryption Protocol for Industrial Internet of Things

Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) has suffered from insufficient identity authentication and dynamic network topology, thereby resulting in vulnerabilities to data confidentiality. Recently, the attribute-based encryption (ABE) schemes have been regarded as a solution to ensure data transmission security and the fine-grained sharing of encrypted IoT data. However, most of existing ABE schemes that bring tremendous computational cost are not suitable for resource-constrained IoT devices. Therefore, lightweight and efficient data sharing and searching schemes suitable for IoT applications are of great importance. To this end, In this article, we propose a light searchable ABE scheme (namely LSABE). Our scheme can significantly reduce the computing cost of IoT devices with the provision of multiple-keyword searching for data users. Meanwhile, we extend the LSABE scheme to multiauthority scenarios so as to effectively generate and manage the public/secret keys in the distributed IoT environment. Finally, the experimental results demonstrate that our schemes can significantly maintain computational efficiency and save the computational cost at IoT devices, compared to other existing schemes.

I. Introduction

Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) is a new paradigm reshaping modern industries via connecting various devices with IoT gateways, access points, and base stations, consequently achieving ubiquitous data acquisition and sharing across the diverse industrial sectors. The widespread employment of IoT nodes bring an enormous amount of data. The analytics on massive IoT data can further drive the developments of fault detection, disaster forecasting, service improvement, and intelligent decision making.