Secure data sharing in cloud and IoT by leveraging attribute-based encryption and blockchain

“Data sharing is very important to enable different types of cloud and IoT-based services. For example, organizations migrate their data to the cloud and share it with employees and customers in order to enjoy better fault-tolerance, high-availability, and scalability offered by the cloud. Wearable devices such as smart watch share user’s activity, location, and health data (e.g., heart rate, ECG) with the service provider for smart analytic. However, data can be sensitive, and the cloud and IoT service providers cannot be fully trusted with maintaining the security, privacy, and confidentiality of the data. Hence, new schemes and protocols are required to enable secure data sharing in the cloud and IoT. This work outlines our research contribution towards secure data sharing in the cloud and IoT. For secure data sharing in the cloud, this work proposes several novel attribute-based encryption schemes. The core contributions to this end are efficient revocation, prevention of collusion attacks, and multi-group support. On the other hand, for secure data sharing in IoT, a permissioned blockchain-based access control system has been proposed. The system can be used to enforce fine-grained access control on IoT data where the access control decision is made by the blockchain-based on the consensus of the participating nodes”--Abstract, page iv

Performance evaluation of attribute-based encryption in automotive embedded platform for secure software over-the-air update

This paper aims to show that it is possible to improve security for over the air update functionalities in an automotive scenario through the use of a cryptographic scheme, called “Attribute-Based-Encryption” (ABE), which grants confidentiality to the software/firmware update done Over The Air (OTA). We demonstrate that ABE is seamlessly integrable into the state of the art solutions regarding the OTA update by showing that the overhead of the ABE integration in terms of computation time and its storage is negligible w.r.t. the other overheads that are introduced by the OTA process, also proving that security can be enhanced with a minimum cost. In order to support our claim, we report the experimental results of an implementation of the proposed ABE OTA technique on a Xilinx ZCU102 evaluation board, which is an automotive-oriented HW/SW platform that is equipped with a Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC chip that is representative of the computing capability of real automotive Electronic Control Units (ECUs)

SEA-BREW: A scalable Attribute-Based Encryption revocable scheme for low-bitrate IoT wireless networks

Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) is an emerging cryptographic technique that allows one to embed a fine-grained access control mechanism into encrypted data. In this paper we propose a novel ABE scheme called SEA-BREW (Scalable and Efficient Abe with Broadcast REvocation for Wireless networks), which is suited for Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial IoT (IIoT) applications. In contrast to state-of-the-art ABE schemes, ours is capable of securely performing key revocations with a single short broadcast message, instead of a number of unicast messages that is linear with the number of nodes. This is desirable for low-bitrate Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WSANs) which often are the heart of (I)IoT systems. In SEA-BREW, sensors, actuators, and users can exchange encrypted data via a cloud server, or directly via wireless if they belong to the same WSAN. We formally prove that our scheme is secure also in case of an untrusted cloud server that colludes with a set of users, under the generic bilinear group model. We show by simulations that our scheme requires a constant computational overhead on the cloud server with respect to the complexity of the access control policies. This is in contrast to state-of-the-art solutions, which require instead a linear computational overhead

User-Centric Security and Privacy Mechanisms in Untrusted Networking and Computing Environments

Our modern society is increasingly relying on the collection, processing, and sharing of digital information. There are two fundamental trends: (1) Enabled by the rapid developments in sensor, wireless, and networking technologies, communication and networking are becoming more and more pervasive and ad hoc. (2) Driven by the explosive growth of hardware and software capabilities, computation power is becoming a public utility and information is often stored in centralized servers which facilitate ubiquitous access and sharing. Many emerging platforms and systems hinge on both dimensions, such as E-healthcare and Smart Grid. However, the majority information handled by these critical systems is usually sensitive and of high value, while various security breaches could compromise the social welfare of these systems. Thus there is an urgent need to develop security and privacy mechanisms to protect the authenticity, integrity and confidentiality of the collected data, and to control the disclosure of private information. In achieving that, two unique challenges arise: (1) There lacks centralized trusted parties in pervasive networking; (2) The remote data servers tend not to be trusted by system users in handling their data. They make existing security solutions developed for traditional networked information systems unsuitable. To this end, in this dissertation we propose a series of user-centric security and privacy mechanisms that resolve these challenging issues in untrusted network and computing environments, spanning wireless body area networks (WBAN), mobile social networks (MSN), and cloud computing. The main contributions of this dissertation are fourfold. First, we propose a secure ad hoc trust initialization protocol for WBAN, without relying on any pre-established security context among nodes, while defending against a powerful wireless attacker that may or may not compromise sensor nodes. The protocol is highly usable for a human user. Second, we present novel schemes for sharing sensitive information among distributed mobile hosts in MSN which preserves user privacy, where the users neither need to fully trust each other nor rely on any central trusted party. Third, to realize owner-controlled sharing of sensitive data stored on untrusted servers, we put forward a data access control framework using Multi-Authority Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE), that supports scalable fine-grained access and on-demand user revocation, and is free of key-escrow. Finally, we propose mechanisms for authorized keyword search over encrypted data on untrusted servers, with efficient multi-dimensional range, subset and equality query capabilities, and with enhanced search privacy. The common characteristic of our contributions is they minimize the extent of trust that users must place in the corresponding network or computing environments, in a way that is user-centric, i.e., favoring individual owners/users

CUPS : Secure Opportunistic Cloud of Things Framework based on Attribute Based Encryption Scheme Supporting Access Policy Update

The ever‐growing number of internet connected devices, coupled with the new computing trends, namely within emerging opportunistic networks, engenders several security concerns. Most of the exchanged data between the internet of things (IoT) devices are not adequately secured due to resource constraints on IoT devices. Attribute‐based encryption is a promising cryptographic mechanism suitable for distributed environments, providing flexible access control to encrypted data contents. However, it imposes high decryption costs, and does not support access policy update, for highly dynamic environments. This paper presents CUPS, an ABE‐based framework for opportunistic cloud of things applications, that securely outsources data decryption process to edge nodes in order to reduce the computation overhead on the user side. CUPS allows end‐users to offload most of the decryption overhead to an edge node and verify the correctness of the received partially decrypted data from the edge node. Moreover, CUPS provides the access policy update feature with neither involving a proxy‐server, nor re‐encrypting the enciphered data contents and re‐distributing the users' secret keys. The access policy update feature in CUPS does not affect the size of the message received by the end‐user, which reduces the bandwidth and the storage usage. Our comprehensive theoretical analysis proves that CUPS outperforms existing schemes in terms of functionality, communication and computation overheads

Implementation of Deduplication on Encrypted Big-data using Signcryption for cloud storage applications

As Big Data Cloud storage servers are getting widespread the shortage of disc space within the cloud becomes a major concern. The elimination of duplicate or redundant data, particularly in computer data is named deduplication. Data deduplication is a method to regulate the explosive growth of information within the cloud storage, most of the storage providers are finding more secure and efficient methods for their sensitive method. Recently, a noteworthy technique referred to as signcryption has been proposed, in which both the properties of signature (ownership) and encryption are simultaneously implemented with better performance According to deduplication, we introduce a method that can eliminate redundant encrypted data owned by different users. Furthermore, we generate a tag which will be the key component of big data management. We propose a technique called digital signature for ownership verification. Convergent encryption also called for a content hash key cryptosystem. Convergent encryption is an encryption approach that supports deduplication. With this encryption technique, the encryption key is generated out of a hash of plain text. Therefore applying this technique, identical plaintexts would turn out the same ciphertext

A Practical Framework for Storing and Searching Encrypted Data on Cloud Storage

Security has become a significant concern with the increased popularity of cloud storage services. It comes with the vulnerability of being accessed by third parties. Security is one of the major hurdles in the cloud server for the user when the user data that reside in local storage is outsourced to the cloud. It has given rise to security concerns involved in data confidentiality even after the deletion of data from cloud storage. Though, it raises a serious problem when the encrypted data needs to be shared with more people than the data owner initially designated. However, searching on encrypted data is a fundamental issue in cloud storage. The method of searching over encrypted data represents a significant challenge in the cloud. Searchable encryption allows a cloud server to conduct a search over encrypted data on behalf of the data users without learning the underlying plaintexts. While many academic SE schemes show provable security, they usually expose some query information, making them less practical, weak in usability, and challenging to deploy. Also, sharing encrypted data with other authorized users must provide each document's secret key. However, this way has many limitations due to the difficulty of key management and distribution. We have designed the system using the existing cryptographic approaches, ensuring the search on encrypted data over the cloud. The primary focus of our proposed model is to ensure user privacy and security through a less computationally intensive, user-friendly system with a trusted third party entity. To demonstrate our proposed model, we have implemented a web application called CryptoSearch as an overlay system on top of a well-known cloud storage domain. It exhibits secure search on encrypted data with no compromise to the user-friendliness and the scheme's functional performance in real-world applications.Comment: 146 Pages, Master's Thesis, 6 Chapters, 96 Figures, 11 Table