Proxy re-encryption with plaintext checkable encryption for integrating digital twins into IIoT

Digital Twin (DT) technology has emerged as a robust mechanism for overseeing and improving the lifecycle processes of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) by creating their virtual counterparts. The widespread employment of cloud computing is apparent in delivering computational and storage services for the DT within the IIoT environment. Ensuring the confidentiality of DT data is crucial since data owners, cloud service providers, and users operate across separate trust domains. Accordingly, public key encryption is a viable solution for managing access. However, traditional public key encryption encounters challenges in achieving effective search and secure sharing of encrypted DT data in the cloud. This paper introduces a proxy re-encryption scheme with plaintext checkable encryption for data access control (PRE-IBSC-PCE), which addresses the challenges associated with searching for and sharing encrypted digital twin data in the cloud. The PRE-IBSC-PCE achieves efficient data search and sharing while ensuring privacy, integrity, non-repudiation, and authenticity. Meanwhile, we prove that PRE-IBSC-PCE is secure under the decisional bilinear Diffie–Hellman assumption in the random oracle model. Lastly, when compared to similar schemes, the performance analysis of the PRE-IBSC-PCE is more efficient and suitable for DT applications in IIoT.