Attribute-Based Searchable Encryption in Edge Computing for Lightweight Devices

The development of the Internet has dramatically facilitated the present society. While a large amount of data is produced, private data security involves users' data rights. Traditionally, attribute-based encryption (ABE) still needs to improve efficiency in the face of a large amount of data. The introduction of edge computing environments reduces the operating costs of lightweight devices by outsourcing some encryption and decryption operations. Therefore, we design an efficient attribute-based encryption scheme under edge computing that supports keyword search. Data owners and users do not disclose private information to the cloud during the search phase. Our work considers the computational efficiency of ordinary and lightweight users, and partial operations can be outsourced according to the demand during decryption, which is more flexible and applicable to practical applications. The scheme also supports efficient attribute revocation and ciphertext update in the cloud environment. Moreover, the proposed algorithm has been proven to be IND-sCP-CPA security and IND-CKA security. The work compares our algorithm with some typical schemes in terms of storage overhead and computation cost in the end. The performance analysis results indicate that the proposed work is efficient and suitable for edge computing.