Secure Data Sharing with ABE in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

This research paper addresses the issue of secure data sharing for distributed data storage in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In WSNs, storing data at local sensor nodes or at designated in-network nodes greatly saves the network-wide communication load and has a lot of benefits such as energy-efficiency. However, unattended wireless sensor nodes are very likely subject to strong attacks such as physical compromise. In this sense a storage node in WSNs can be viewed as an untrusted storage since the owner of the WSN may have concerns on data security in mission-critical applications if data are stored without proper protection. A secure data storage and retrieval scheme is required for distributed data storage in WSNs. When previous works focus on data confidentiality and integrity protection or communication security, the issue of fine-grained data access control in WSNs is seldom addressed. In this chapter we address this issue and provides a cryptographic-based access control mechanism with ABE. The main challenge in this work is to make the expensive ABE operations affordable to resource-constrained sensor nodes. We resolve this issue by dividing the lifetime of sensor nodes into phases and then distribute the underlying mathematical operations in ABE over these phases. To minimize the communication and computation load on sensor nodes in case of user revocation, we revise an existing ABE scheme and makes the user revocation complexity on sensor nodes constant. Formal security proof and experimental results shows that our proposed solution is provably secure and affordable to real sensor nodes. To the best of our knowledge, our work is de facto the first that provides a secure mechanism for distributed fine-grained data access control in WSNs.