Secure Data Access Control for Fog Computing Based on Multi-Authority Attribute-Based Signcryption with Computation...

Area of Science:

• Computer Science
• Information Security
• Distributed Systems

Background:

• Fog computing enables IoT services but faces challenges in fine-grained access control.
• Attribute-based Signcryption (ABSC) offers efficiency and security but existing schemes have high user computation costs and single-authority limitations.
• Real-world systems often involve multiple authorities managing user attributes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose OMDAC-ABSC, a novel data access control scheme for multi-authority fog computing environments.
• To enhance data confidentiality, fine-grained control, and anonymous authentication.
• To reduce computation overhead for end-users by outsourcing tasks to fog nodes.

Main Methods:

• Developed a Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-based Signcryption (CP-ABSC) scheme named OMDAC-ABSC.
• Implemented a multi-authority framework leveraging fog nodes for computation offloading.
• Provided formal security proofs in the standard model, including attribute revocation and public verifiability.

Main Results:

• OMDAC-ABSC significantly reduces user computation overhead for signcryption and designcryption.
• The scheme provides robust data confidentiality, fine-grained access control, and anonymous authentication.
• Security analysis and implementation results demonstrate a balance between security and computational efficiency.

Conclusions:

• OMDAC-ABSC effectively addresses the limitations of existing ABSC schemes in multi-authority fog computing.
• The proposed scheme offers a practical and secure solution for data access control in IoT environments.
• Outsourcing computation to fog nodes is a viable strategy for improving user-side efficiency.