Attribute-based Hybrid Encryption & Privacy Preservation Framework for Securing Broadcast Communication Channels

Broadcast communication channels allow users to transact data packets with large groups of people. Which indicates that a greater number of nodes participate in communication, thereby increasing probability of spoofing, spying, and other network attacks. Due to which, encryption strength for this data must be higher than node-to-node unicast communications. A wide variety of models are available to perform this task, but these models compromise on communication quality of service (QoS) in order to enhance encryption performance, due to which they have limited scalability. In order to overcome this drawback, a novel attribute-based hybrid encryption & privacy preservation framework (ABHEPB) is proposed in this text. The proposed model uses attribute-based encryption with packet-lifetime awareness in order to avoid any intermediate attacks. This is achieved via combination of Fernet model with initialization vector (IV) based encryption. The ABHEPB model uses node-level attributes from all broadcasting nodes in order to create a broadcast key. This broadcast key is recreated during decryption via node-level attributes, which can mitigate key-leakage issues from the communication channel. The IV encryption model uses stochastic values of the same key-vector in order to further improve encryption strength, which imbibes automatic key-validation in the network. The encrypted data is further secured using an exponential mechanism to achieve differential privacy. Due to which, the broadcasting parties cannot accidentally gather identifiable information about other nodes. The proposed model was evaluated under a wide variety of attack scenarios, and its attack resilience along with QoS metrics were evaluated. It was observed that the proposed model had 23% lower delay, 19% better attack resilience, and 20% lower complexity when compared with state-of-the-art methods, thereby facilitating its use for real-time deployment scenarios.