Achieving scalable access control over encrypted data for edge computing networks

The concept of Internet of Things (IoT) has raised in the cloud computing paradigm as it adds latency when migrating all pieces of data from the network edge to the data center for them to be approached. Edge computing has been introduced to extend the cloud computing architecture to the edge of the network, which analyzes most of the IoT data near the devices that produce and act on that data. Though edge computing solves the latency problem of data processing, it also brings issues to the data security and privacy preservation. One technique which is potential to provide scalable access control to support data security and privacy in edge computing is attribute-based encryption (ABE). In this paper, we propose a primitive named proxy-aided ciphertext-policy ABE (PA-CPABE), which outsources the majority of the decryption computations to edge devices. Compared to the existing ABE with outsourced decryption schemes, PA-CPABE has an advantage in which the key distribution does not require any secure channels. We present a generic construction of PA-CPABE and then formally prove its security. In addition, we implement an instantiation of the proposed PA-CPABE framework to evaluate its performance.