An Attribute-Based Searchable Encryption Scheme for Cloud-Assisted IIoT

The searchable encryption (SE) is a particular case of structured encryption, which has been intensively researched in the secure cloud storage system. By constructing a structured secure index, such as encrypted multimaps (EMMs), encrypted inverted index (EII), etc., SE can achieve efficient keyword search over the encrypted data set. However, existing SE constructions do not take search permissions into consideration, resulting in the lack of a mechanism of the data access control, which may not be suitable for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications, since an integrated industrial system contains all kinds of data with rigorous access permissions. In this article, we construct an attribute-based SE (ABSE) construction for a cloud-assisted IIoT application scenario. By designing the novel access policy-based structured secure index and the attribute-based search token, our construction achieves fine-grained keyword search privilege control over encrypted IIoT data as well as the same search complexity as the traditional SE. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first ABSE construction. We provide the correctness and security proofs for our construction. Experimental evaluation results in a real-world data set show the correctness and the practical search efficiency of the proposed ABSE.