Novel Searchable Attribute-Based Encryption for the Internet of Things

As the product of the third information technology revolution, the Internet of Things (IoT) has greatly altered our way of lifetime. Cloud storage has gradually become the best choice for data processing due to its scalability and flexibility. However, the cloud is not a completely trusted entity, such as tampering with user data or leaking personal privacy. Therefore, cloud storage usually adopts attribute-based encryption schemes to accomplish data confidentiality and fine-grained access control. However, applying the ABE scheme to the Internet of Things still faces many challenges, such as dynamic user revocation, data sharing, and excessive computational burden. In this paper, we propose a novel searchable attribute encryption system that replaces the traditional key generation center with consortium blockchain to generate and manage partial keys. In addition, our scheme can perform predecryption operations in the cloud, and users only need to spend a small amount of computational cost to achieve decryption operations. Security analysis proves that our scheme achieves security under both the chosen keyword attack and the chosen plaintext attack. Compared with other schemes, this scheme is more economical in terms of computing and storage.