A lightweight attribute-based encryption scheme for the Internet of Things

• Propose a lightweight no-pairing ECC-Based ABE scheme for the Internet of Things.
• The security depends on the ECDDH assumption instead of bilinear Diffie–Hellman based assumptions.
• The criteria and metrics for measuring the overhead are defined uniformly.
• Comparisons with the existing ABE schemes in efficiency illustrate its lightweight.

Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging network paradigm, which realizes the interconnections among the ubiquitous things and is the foundation of smart society. Since IoT are always related to user’s daily life or work, the privacy and security are of great importance. The pervasive, complex and heterogeneous properties of IoT make its security issues very challenging. In addition, the large number of resources-constraint nodes makes a rigid lightweight requirement for IoT security mechanisms. Presently, the attribute-based encryption (ABE) is a popular solution to achieve secure data transmission, storage and sharing in the distributed environment such as IoT. However, the existing ABE schemes are based on expensive bilinear pairing, which make them not suitable for the resources-constraint IoT applications. In this paper, a lightweight no-pairing ABE scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is proposed to address the security and privacy issues in IoT. The security of the proposed scheme is based on the ECDDH assumption instead of bilinear Diffie–Hellman assumption, and is proved in the attribute based selective-set model. By uniformly determining the criteria and defining the metrics for measuring the communication overhead and computational overhead, the comparison analyses with the existing ABE schemes are made in detail. The results show that the proposed scheme has improved execution efficiency and low communication costs. In addition, the limitations and the improving directions of it are also discussed in detail.