Outsourced Decentralized Multi-Authority Attribute Based Signature and Its Application in IoT

IoT (Internet of things) devices often collect data and store the data in the cloud for sharing and further processing; This collection, sharing, and processing will inevitably encounter secure access and authentication issues. Attribute based signature (ABS), which utilizes the signer’s attributes to generate private keys, plays a competent role in data authentication and identity privacy preservation. In ABS, there are multiple authorities that issue different private keys for signers based on their various attributes, and a central authority is usually established to manage all these attribute authorities. However, one security concern is that if the central authority is compromised, the whole system will be broken. In this paper, we present an outsourced decentralized multi-authority attribute based signature (ODMA-ABS) scheme. The proposed ODMA-ABS achieves attribute privacy and stronger authority-corruption resistance than existing multi-authority attribute based signature schemes can achieve. In addition, the overhead to generate a signature is further reduced by outsourcing expensive computation to a signing cloud server. We present extensive security analysis and experimental simulation of the proposed scheme. We also propose an access control scheme that is based on ODMA-ABS.