Efficient Data Access Control With Fine-Grained Data Protection in Cloud-Assisted IIoT

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has provided a promising opportunity to build digitalized industrial systems. A fundamental technology of IIoT is the radio-frequency identification (RFID) technique, which allows industrial participants to identify items and anchor time-series IoT data for them. They can further share the IoT data through the cloud service to enable information exchange and support critical decisions in production operations. Storing IoT data in the cloud, however, requires a data access control mechanism to protect sensitive business issues. Unfortunately, using traditional cryptographic access control schemes for time-series IoT data face severe efficiency and key leakage problems. In this article, we design a secure industrial data access control scheme for cloud-assisted IIoT. Our scheme enables participants to enforce fine-grained access control policies for their IoT data via ciphertext policy-attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) scheme. Our scheme adopts a hybrid cloud infrastructure for participants to outsource expensive CP-ABE tasks to the cloud service with strong privacy guarantees. Importantly, our scheme guarantees a new privacy notion named item-level data protection for IoT data to prevent key leakage problem. We achieve these goals via several encryption and optimization techniques. Our performance assessments combine system implementation with large-scale emulations and confirm the security and efficiency of our design.

Automated summary

The Industrial Internet of Things offers a promising opportunity for digitalized industrial systems with RFID technology being a fundamental aspect. However, storing IoT data in the cloud requires a data access control mechanism to protect sensitive business issues, which traditional cryptographic access control schemes face efficiency and key leakage problems. This article presents a secure industrial data access control scheme for cloud-assisted IIoT, allowing fine-grained access control policies for IoT data and implementing item-level data protection to prevent key leakage.