Sharing your privileges securely: a key-insulated attribute based proxy re-encryption scheme for IoT

Attribute based proxy re-encryption (ABPRE) combines the merits of proxy re-encryption and attribute based encryption, which allows a delegator to re-encrypt the ciphertext according to the delegatees’ attributes. The theoretical foundations of ABPRE has been well studied, yet to date there are still issues in schemes of ABPRE, among which time-bounded security and key exposure protection for the re-encryption keys are the most concerning ones. Within the current ABPRE framework, the re-encryption keys are generated independently of the system time segments and the forward security protection is not guaranteed when the users’ access privileges are altered. In this paper, we present a key-insulated ABPRE scheme for IoT scenario. We realize secure and fine-grained data sharing by utilizing attribute based encryption over the encrypted data, as well as adopting key-insulation mechanism to provide forward security for re-encryption keys and private keys of users. In particular, the lifetime of the system is divided into several time slices, and when system enters into a new slice, the user’s private keys need are required to be refreshed. Therefore, the users’ access privileges in our system are time-bounded, and both re-encryption keys and private keys can be protected, which will enhance the security level during data re-encryption, especially in situations when key exposure or privilege alternation happens. Our scheme is proved to be secure under MDBDH hardness assumptions as well as against collusion attack. In addition, the public parameters do not have to be changed during the evolution of users’ private keys, which will require less computation resources brought by parameter synchronization in IoT.