C-CP-ABE: Cooperative Ciphertext Policy Attribute-Based Encryption for the Internet of Things

Cipher text Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) is an extremely powerful asymmetric encryption mechanism, but its complexity and its overhead cannot be neglected in an Internet of Things environment. Indeed, Internet of Things, by its heterogeneous nature, may contains highly resource-constrained devices that are not able to support the heavy overhead due to CP-ABE. Further, constrained devices, like sensors, often need to encrypt data as they are usually led to send sensitive data they collect to more powerful devices like storage servers. This paper proposes a novel approach for employing CP-ABE on highly resource-constrained sensor nodes in the IoT environments. The proposed approach exploits collaboration between heterogeneous nodes, to make feasible the implementation of CP-ABE in an IoT environment, by delegating costly operations to a set of assisting nodes. An analysis is conducted to verify that the proposed solution accomplishes safely and efficiently its objective.