FATE: flexible attribute-based traceable encrypted data sharing scheme using smart contracts in wireless medical sensor networks

Abstract

Given the adaptability and effectiveness of the smart health sector, it has gained much momentum in the last few years, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the security and privacy of data sent through a public communication channel are gravely threatened by adopting cloud services for data sharing. The security and privacy of the data are also in jeopardy, as the owners lose full ownership of the material once it is uploaded to the cloud. In recent years, ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) has shown great potential as a privacy-preserving encryption mechanism. In this paper, a decentralized method of large-scale data storage has been introduced using the interplanetary file system (IPFS), thereby eliminating the issue of centralized storage and frequent data unavailability. A reliable third-party hospital node in a secure environment is adopted in the proposed model to guarantee data integrity and to reduce the load on the resource-constrained devices of the user. Simulation using the Charm-Crypto framework and Pairing-Based Cryptography library using the SS512 curve proves its performance and efficiency. The proposed scheme’s encryption time is constant at 46.96 ms regardless of the size of the attribute set, the key generation time is reduced by 79.09%, and the storage overhead is reduced by 71.3% as compared to the existing schemes.