Enhancement of a Lightweight Attribute-Based Encryption Scheme for the Internet of Things

In this paper, we present the enhancement of a lightweight key-policy attribute-based encryption (KP-ABE) scheme designed for the Internet of Things (IoT). The KP-ABE scheme was claimed to achieve ciphertext indistinguishability under chosen-plaintext attack in the selective-set model but we show that the KP-ABE scheme is insecure even in the weaker security notion, namely, one-way encryption under the same attack and model. In particular, we show that an attacker can decrypt a ciphertext which does not satisfy the policy imposed on his decryption key. Subsequently, we propose an efficient fix to the KP-ABE scheme as well as extending it to be a hierarchical KP-ABE (H-KP-ABE) scheme that can support role delegation in IoT applications. An example of applying our H-KP-ABE on an IoT-connected healthcare system is given to highlight the benefit of the delegation feature. Lastly, using the NIST curves secp192k1 and secp256k1, we benchmark the fixed (hierarchical) KP-ABE scheme on an Android phone and the result shows that the scheme is still the fastest in the literature.