Distributed Attribute Based Access Control of Aggregated Data in Sensor Clouds

Sensor clouds are large scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs), built by connecting a number of smaller WSNs together. Each of these smaller individual WSNs may be owned by different owners. Sensor clouds are dynamic in nature, where wireless sensors can be provisioned and de-provisioned for the users on demand. In such a multi-user, multi-owner system, user access control is a significant problem. Previous user access control schemes have been centralized and designed for standalone sensors or smaller networks and do not take large networks into consideration. In large networks, data is generally aggregated in-network during data collection. In this paper, we present a user access control scheme, which unlike other schemes, is distributed and works on aggregated data within a sensor network. Our scheme which is based on attribute based encryption is also able to differentiate between users who require data with the same set of attributes, which would be a necessity in a commercial sensor cloud system. Our scheme gives the flexibility to sensor network owners to control user access of data from their sensors. Finally, we compare our scheme with other closely related schemes in terms of attack resilience and computation and communication overhead to show its effectiveness.