Enabling Attribute Based Encryption as an Internet Service

Abstract

Internet enabled services and technologies are changing the way we use and manage massive amounts of data. More and more users and organizations are increasingly relying on cloud storage services for data management. In such Internet enabled environments, protecting sensitive data is increasingly becoming very crucial. Attribute-based Encryption (ABE) based approaches have been recognized as very promising for data protection in such environments. ABE approaches support data confidentiality and fine-grained access control in Internet-based environments, which include Internet of things (IoTs) and a plethora of heterogeneous mobile devices that enable large scale applications. However, in IoTs and mobile applications the limited computational resources and finite battery power of devices make it very difficult to use ABE schemes because of their heavy computational requirements. Although outsourced computational techniques have been applied in partial ABE schemes to address such issues, a unified platform that supports all aspects of data protection in an Internet-based open environment as well as fast cryptographic operations and decentralized authorities, etc., is still lacking. In this paper, we propose a novel Attribute Based Encryption as a Service (ABEaaS) that can be leveraged for data protection in the Internet environments. We propose an ABEaaS framework that can be easily deployed and present related security and performance analysis.