A Lightweight and Flexible Encryption Scheme to Protect Sensitive Data in Smart Building Scenarios

Smart buildings represent key environments to encourage the growth of more sustainable and efficient cities. With the strong development of the Internet of Things (IoT), the integration of heterogeneous physical devices fosters the emergence of data-driven services to make more effective decisions accordingly. However, the need for sharing large amounts of data could help to infer users' sensitive information, such as their daily habits, thus harming their privacy. Under these premises, this paper introduces an encryption scheme based on the lightness of the symmetric cryptography, and the expressiveness of attribute-based encryption. Our proposal aims to ensure only authorised services will be able to access specific pieces of data, so that users' privacy is not compromised, while scalability and efficiency are provided. The resulting scheme has been deployed on a real smart building scenario, and validation results demonstrate its suitability to protect large amounts of sensitive data on IoT-enabled buildings.