With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing technologies, smart health (s-health) is expected to significantly improve the quality of health care. However, data security and user privacy concerns in s-health have not been adequately addressed. As a well-received solution to realize fine-grained access control, ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) has the potential to ensure data security in s-health. Nevertheless, direct adoption of the traditional CP-ABE in s-health suffers two flaws. For one thing, access policies are in cleartext form and reveal sensitive health-related information in the encrypted s-health records (SHRs). For another, it usually supports small attribute universe, which places an undesirable limitation on practical deployments of CP-ABE because the size of its public parameters grows linearly with the size of the universe. To address these problems, we introduce PASH, a privacy-aware s-health access control system, in which the key ingredient is a large universe CP-ABE with access policies partially hidden. In PASH, attribute values of access policies are hidden in encrypted SHRs and only attribute names are revealed. In fact, attribute values carry much more sensitive information than generic attribute names. Particularly, PASH realizes an efficient SHR decryption test which needs a small number of bilinear pairings. The attribute universe can be exponentially large and the size of public parameters is small and constant. Our security analysis indicates that PASH is fully secure in the standard model. Performance comparisons and experimental results show that PASH is more efficient and expressive than previous schemes.

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) for cloud computing access control is reviewed in this article. A taxonomy and comprehensive assessment criteria of ABE are first proposed. In the taxonomy, ABE schemes are assorted into key-policy ABE (KP-ABE) schemes, ciphertext-policy ABE (CP-ABE) schemes, anti-quantum ABE schemes, and generic constructions. In accordance with cryptographically functional features, CP-ABE is further divided into nine subcategories with regard to basic functionality, revocation, accountability, policy hiding, policy updating, multi-authority, hierarchy, offline computation, and outsourced computation. In addition, a systematical methodology for discussing and comparing existing ABE schemes is proposed. For KP-ABE and each type of CP-ABE, the corresponding access control scenario is presented and explained by concrete examples. Specifically, the syntax of ABE is given followed by the adversarial model and security goals. ABE schemes are discussed according to the design strategies and special features and are compared in the light of the proposed assessment criteria with respect to security and performance. Compared to related state-of-the-art survey papers, this article not only provides a broader 12 categories of ABE schemes, but also makes a more comprehensive and holistic comparison. Finally, a number of open research challenges in ABE are pointed out.

With the digitalization of various industries, the combination of cloud computing and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has become an attractive data processing paradigm. However, cloud-assisted IIoT still has challenging issues including authenticity of data, untrustworthiness of third parties, and system robustness and efficiency. Recently Karati et al. [1] proposed a lightweight certificateless signature (CLS) scheme for cloud-assisted IIoT, that was claimed to address both authenticity of data and untrustworthiness of third parties. In this paper, we demonstrate that the CLS scheme fails to achieve the claimed security properties by presenting four types of signature forgery attacks. We also propose a robust certificateless signature (RCLS) scheme to address the aforementioned challenges. Our RCLS only needs public channels and is proven secure against both public key replacement attacks and malicious-but-passive third parties in the standard model. Performance evaluation indicates that RCLS outperforms other CLS schemes and is suitable for IIoT.

The evolving fifth generation (5G) cellular networks will be a collection of heterogeneous and backward-compatible networks. With the increased heterogeneity and densification of 5G heterogeneous networks (HetNets), it is important to ensure security and efficiency of frequent handovers in 5G wireless roaming environments. However, existing handover authentication mechanisms still have challenging issues, such as anonymity, robust traceability and universality. In this paper, we address these issues by introducing RUSH, a Robust and Universal Seamless Handover authentication protocol for 5G HetNets. In RUSH, anonymous mutual authentication with key agreement is enabled for handovers by exploiting the trapdoor collision property of chameleon hash functions and the tamper-resistance of blockchains. RUSH achieves universal handover authentication for all the diverse mobility scenarios, as exemplified by the handover between 5G new radio and non-3GPP access regardless of the trustworthiness of non-3GPP access and the consistency of the core network. RUSH also achieves perfect forward secrecy, master key forward secrecy, known randomness secrecy, key escrow freeness and robust traceability. Our formal security proofs based on the BAN-logic and formal verification based on AVISPA indicate that RUSH resists various attacks. Comprehensive performance evaluation and comparisons show that RUSH outperforms other schemes in both computation and communication efficiencies.

With the processes of collecting, analyzing, and transmitting the data in the Internet of Things (IoT), the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) comprises the medical equipment and applications connected to the healthcare system and offers an entity with real time, remote measurement, and analysis of healthcare data. However, the IoMT ecosystem deals with some great challenges in terms of security, such as privacy leaking, eavesdropping, unauthorized access, delayed detection of life-threatening episodes, and so forth. All these negative effects seriously impede the implementation of the IoMT ecosystem. To overcome these obstacles, this article presents an efficient, outsourced online/offline revocable ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption scheme with the aid of cloud servers and blockchains in the IoMT ecosystem. Our proposal achieves the characteristics of fine-grained access control, fast encryption, outsourced decryption, user revocation, and ciphertext verification. It is noteworthy that based on the chameleon hash function, we construct the private key of the data user with collision resistance, semantically secure, and key-exposure free to achieve revocation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first protocol for a revocation mechanism by means of the chameleon hash function. Through formal analysis, it is proven to be secure in a selectively replayable chosen-ciphertext attack (RCCA) game. Finally, this scheme is implemented with the Java pairing-based cryptography library, and the simulation results demonstrate that it enables high efficiency and practicality, as well as strong reliability for the IoMT ecosystem.