Fine-grained encryption for search and rescue operation on Internet of Things

The search and rescue operation is an increasingly important Internet of Things (IoT) application in which the resource-constrained things play the rescue role. Recently, more and more countries/organizations participate in a rescue task. To make the task more effective, they should share their information with each other but different countries have assorted sharing policies. Our investigation shows that access control systems for current search and rescue operations are either coarse-grained or computationally heavy. It cannot satisfy the rescue operations since those things demand lightweight cryptographic operations and the participating countries require flexible policies to protect their classified data. We propose a fine-grained access control system which is not only secure but also efficient. The practical experiments are conducted and its results demonstrate the lightweight cost in simulation.