ABE-Cities: An Attribute-Based Encryption System for Smart Cities

TL;DR

The paper introduces ABE-Cities, an attribute-based encryption scheme designed for smart city data, enabling secure, fine-grained access control with efficient key management suitable for resource-constrained sensing devices.

Contribution

It presents a novel ABE scheme tailored for urban sensing data that ensures security, fine-grained access, and efficient key revocation in smart city environments.

Findings

Efficient key revocation methods demonstrated through simulations.

Lightweight encryption suitable for resource-constrained devices.

Enhanced data security and access control in smart city data management.

Abstract

In the near future, a technological revolution will involve our cities, where a variety of smart services based on the Internet of Things will be developed to facilitate the needs of the citizens. Sensing devices are already being deployed in urban environments, and they will generate huge amounts of data. Such data are typically outsourced to some cloud storage because this lowers capital and operating expenses and guarantees high availability. However, cloud storage may have incentives to release stored data to unauthorized entities. In this work we present ABE-Cities, an encryption scheme for urban sensing which solves the above problems while ensuring fine-grained access control on data by means of Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE). Basically, ABE-Cities encrypts data before storing it in the cloud and provides users with keys able to decrypt only those portions of data the user is authorized to access. In ABE-Cities, the sensing devices perform only lightweight symmetric cryptography operations, thus they can also be resource-constrained. ABE-Cities provides planned expiration of keys, as well as their unplanned revocation. We propose methods to make the key revocation efficient, and we show by simulations the overall efficiency of ABE-Cities.