Outsourcing Attribute-Based Encryption to Enhance IoT Security and Performance

As the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) systems, particularly those integrated with cloud technology, continues to expand, ensuring data security and privacy while maintaining optimal performance becomes increasingly challenging. Complex encryption algorithms, when run on IoT devices with limited resources, can significantly hinder processing speed and resource efficiency. This paper introduces an innovative Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) framework that offloads computationally intensive cryptographic operations to a proxy server. This approach alleviates the computational strain on resource-constrained IoT devices, allowing them to efficiently handle encryption and decryption tasks despite their limited processing power, memory, and battery life. Additionally, we present a robust security model that ensures the privacy and integrity of data in IoT environments, in line with the requirements of ABE. We conduct an extensive performance analysis, evaluating key metrics such as execution time, ciphertext size, and memory usage, demonstrating that our proposed scheme surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods in efficiency. The primary contributions of this work include the development of a lightweight ABE offloading framework, the creation of a strong security model, and a thorough performance assessment that highlights the scheme’s efficiency and practicality for real-world IoT applications.