A Lightweight and Verifiable Access Control Scheme With Constant Size Ciphertext in Edge-Computing-Assisted IoT

As an extension of cloud computing, edge computing has attracted the attention of academia and industry because of its characteristics of low latency, high bandwidth, and low energy consumption. However, due to limited terminal resources and insufficient security design, the edge computing environment still faces many challenges in terms of data security and privacy protection. Among them, how to effectively control access to outsourced data is one of the main issues. In this article, we propose a lightweight and verifiable ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE)-based multiauthority access control scheme for edge computing-assisted Internet of Things (IoT), which adopts the method of outsourcing decryption to mitigate the computational cost of data users with limited resources. In addition, our scheme realizes the feature of attribute revocation, and the design of the multiauthority mechanism enables our scheme to avoid the problem of key escrow. Therefore, our proposed scheme not only ensures data confidentiality but also can resist the collusion attack. Besides, our scheme is secure against the chosen plaintext attack in the random oracle model under the decision <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$q$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -BDHE assumption. Finally, we compared our scheme with some related work in performance, and the results demonstrate that our scheme is efficient in computation and communication. Because our scheme greatly mitigates the overhead of data users, it is very suitable for edge computing supported IoT applications with restricted computation resources.