Certificateless and Revocable Bilateral Access Control for Privacy-Preserving Edge–Cloud Computing

With the rapid advancement of intelligent devices and cloud services, a novel edge-cloud computing paradigm is emerging, finding widespread adoption in numerous advanced applications. Despite its considerable convenience and benefits, edge-cloud computing raises security and privacy concerns. Although many cryptographic solutions have been proposed for the Internet of Things and cloud services, ensuring diverse access control in an untrusted edge-cloud environment and realizing flexible revocation and efficient outsourcing remain challenging. In this article, we propose a certificateless attribute-based matchmaking encryption scheme (CRO-ABME) that supports fine-grained bilateral access control, attribute and identity revocation, and cryptographic workload outsourcing. Leveraging CRO-ABME, we design an edge-cloud data sharing system that ensures secure data uploading with privacy protection between end-users, such that only authorized matchers can access the data in edge-cloud computing. Furthermore, rigorous security proofs for CRO-ABME are provided, and experimental analyses demonstrate the efficiency and flexibility of our proposed scheme.