Lightweight Privacy-Preserving Scheme Using Homomorphic Encryption in Industrial Internet of Things

The emerging technologies, such as smart sensors, 5G/6G wireless communication, artificial intelligence, etc. , have been maturing the future Internet of Things (IoT) by connecting the massive number of devices, which are expected to consistently collect and transmit real-time data to support business intelligence in an efficient and privacy-preserving way. The IoT can afford businesses predictive maintenance, improve field service, asset tracking, and further enhance customer satisfaction and facility management in industrial sectors. However, the privacy concern in IoT is a big challenge in IoT applications and services. This work proposed a lightweight privacy-preserving scheme based on homomorphic encryption in the context of the IoT, in which we investigated and analyzed the privacy issues between the data owners, untrustworthy third-party cloud servers, and the data users. Meanwhile, computationally efficient homomorphic algorithms are proposed to guarantee the privacy protection for the data users. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can effectively prevent privacy breaches in IoT.