Efficient access control with traceability and user revocation in IoT

With the universality and availability of Internet of Things (IoT), data privacy protection in IoT has become a hot issue. As a branch of attribute-based encryption (ABE), ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is widely used in IoT to offer flexible one-to-many encryption. However, in IoT, different mobile devices share messages collected, transmission of large amounts of data brings huge burdens to mobile devices. Efficiency is a bottleneck which restricts the wide application and adoption of CP-ABE in Internet of things. Besides, the decryption key in CP-ABE is shared by multiple users with the same attribute, once the key disclosure occurs, it is non-trivial for the system to tell who maliciously leaked the key. Moreover, if the malicious mobile device is not revoked in time, more security threats will be brought to the system. These problems hinder the application of CP-ABE in IoT. Motivated by the actual need, a scheme called traceable and revocable ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption scheme with constant-size ciphertext and key is proposed in this paper. Compared with the existing schemes, our proposed scheme has the following advantages: (1) Malicious users can be traced; (2) Users exiting the system and misbehaving users are revoked in time, so that they no longer have access to the encrypted data stored in the cloud server; (3) Constant-size ciphertext and key not only improve the efficiency of transmission, but also greatly reduce the time spent on decryption operation; (4) The storage overhead for traceability is constant. Finally, the formal security proof and experiment has been conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of our scheme.