Hierarchical and Multi-Group Data Sharing for Cloud-Assisted Industrial Internet of Things

With the development of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and 5G, massive data are easily collected and transmitted in cloud. Therefore, it is critical to guarantee the security of data sharing. In IIoT applications, the users of a group are in hierarchical structure and they intend to access data by external groups, which requires fine-grained access control, data authenticity and data retrieval. However, existing approaches rarely provide such solutions to satisfy these requirements simultaneously. In this paper, we propose an efficient hierarchical and multi-group data sharing framework (HMGDSF) in cloud-assisted IIoT. Apart from fine-grained data access control for hierarchical users with key leakage resilience, HMGDSF achieves user anonymity with traceability and keyword-based data retrieval. Moreover, the approach supports data authenticity and integrity verification for multi-group data sharing by integrating group signature mechanism. We provide proof for the security of framework and demonstrate its efficiency and practicability by extensive evaluations.