Attribute-Based Encryption in Systems with Resource Constrained Devices in an Information Centric Networking Context

An extensive analysis of attribute-based encryption (ABE) in systems with resource constrained devices is performed. Two system solutions of how ABE can be performed in such systems are proposed, one where the ABE operations are performed at the resource constrained devices and one where ABE is performed at a powerful server. The system solutions are discussed with three different ABE schemes. Two of the schemes are the traditional key policy ABE (KP-ABE) and ciphertext policy ABE (CP-ABE). The third scheme is using KP-ABE to simulate CP-ABE, in an attempt to benefit from KP-ABE being computationally cheaper than CP-ABE while maintaining the intuitive way of using CP-ABE. ABE is a computationally expensive encryption method which might not be feasible to perform at the resource constrained sensors, depending on the hardware. An implementation of a CP-ABE scheme with a 128 bit security level was written and used to evaluate the feasibility of ABE on a sensor equipped with an ARM Cortex-M3 processor having 32 kB RAM and 256 kB flash. It is possible to perform CP-ABE on the sensor used in this project. The limiting factor of feasibility of ABE on the sensor is the RAM size. In this case policy sizes up to 12 attributes can be performed on the sensor. The results give an idea of the feasibility of encryption with ABE on sensors. In addition to the results several ways of improving performance of ABE on the sensor are discussed