Designing Secure Data Storage and Retrieval Scheme in Cloud-Assisted Internet-of-Drones Environment

Internet-of-Drones (IoD) is an emerging network connecting various physical devices, namely, drones, flying area station servers (FASs), controlling authority, and cloud, through the Internet to capture and share data with the intended data users. Outsourcing the data collected by drones to a cloud raises data confidentiality and security issues. The privacy of drone data can be realized by keeping it encrypted form, but it affects flexibility and usability in terms of searching and retrieving encrypted data. Hence, to facilitate the difficulty of working on encrypted data and protect the drone data, we propose a secure data storage and retrieval scheme in a cloud-assisted IoD environment (DSRS-IoD), which is a novel secure hybrid attribute-based searchable encryption with outsourced decryption and verifiable data retrieval mechanism. In the DSRS-IoD framework, a drone transmits the captured data to its FAS using the identity-based encryption mechanism, next, the FAS outsources the received drone data to the cloud employing attribute-based searchable encryption framework, and a data user can securely retrieve the required data from the cloud by leveraging keyword search functionality. Our DSRS-IoD scheme simultaneously supports 1) fine-grained access control; 2) data storage and retrieval services; 3) data integrity; 4) search results self-verifiability; 5) keyword privacy; and 6) lightweight decryption cost. We present formal security models and provide security proofs for our proposed scheme. The experimental results demonstrate that the scheme is practical.