An Efficient ECC-Based CP-ABE Scheme for Power IoT

The rapid development of the power Internet of Things (IoT) has greatly enhanced the level of security, quality and efficiency in energy production, energy consumption, and related fields. However, it also puts forward higher requirements for the security and privacy of data. Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is considered a suitable method to solve this issue and can implement fine-grained access control. However, its internal bilinear pairing operation is too expensive, which is not suitable for power IoT with limited computing resources. Hence, in this paper, a novel CP-ABE scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is proposed, which replaces the bilinear pairing operation with simple scalar multiplication and outsources most of the decryption work to edge devices. In addition, time and location attributes are combined in the proposed scheme, allowing the data users to access only within the range of time and locations set by the data owners to achieve a more fine-grained access control function. Simultaneously, the scheme uses multiple authorities to manage attributes, thereby solving the performance bottleneck of having a single authority. A performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme is effective and suitable for power IoT.