A Decentralized Resource Discovery Using Attribute Based Encryption for Internet of Things

Abstract

The number of devices connected together in the Internet of Things (IoT) are growing and therefore the demand of an efficient and secure method for discovering the resources in IoT is increasing. In most of IoT schemes, the resources are discovered based on their properties (i.e. their location, types, etc.) and the clients are able to discover the resources that are registered in the network. This discovery ability can be restricted to a number of clients by encrypting the discoverable address. However, any client with the key can decrypt and access a private resource regardless of the attributes of the client. In this paper, a decentralized resource discovery model using Cipher Policy Attribute Based Encryption (CP-ABE) and Distributed Hash Table (DHT) is introduced that allows secure and private discovering of the resources in IoT network. We integrated the CP-ABE that allows clients only by users’ inherent attributes, to discover the resources in the network. Our proposed model provides a higher level of security for resource discovery by allowing the resources during registration in addition to their properties to define the attributes of the clients that are able to discover those resources. The model we proposed uses multi-authority ABE, which as a public key encryption can fit the decentralized environment.