Secure data sharing in cloud and IoT by leveraging attribute-based encryption and blockchain

“Data sharing is very important to enable different types of cloud and IoT-based services. For example, organizations migrate their data to the cloud and share it with employees and customers in order to enjoy better fault-tolerance, high-availability, and scalability offered by the cloud. Wearable devices such as smart watch share user’s activity, location, and health data (e.g., heart rate, ECG) with the service provider for smart analytic. However, data can be sensitive, and the cloud and IoT service providers cannot be fully trusted with maintaining the security, privacy, and confidentiality of the data. Hence, new schemes and protocols are required to enable secure data sharing in the cloud and IoT. This work outlines our research contribution towards secure data sharing in the cloud and IoT. For secure data sharing in the cloud, this work proposes several novel attribute-based encryption schemes. The core contributions to this end are efficient revocation, prevention of collusion attacks, and multi-group support. On the other hand, for secure data sharing in IoT, a permissioned blockchain-based access control system has been proposed. The system can be used to enforce fine-grained access control on IoT data where the access control decision is made by the blockchain-based on the consensus of the participating nodes”--Abstract, page iv