Application of Attribute-Based Encryption in Military Internet of Things Environment

The Military Internet of Things (MIoT) has emerged as a new research area in military intelligence. The MIoT frequently has to constitute a federation-capable IoT environment when the military needs to interact with other institutions and organizations or carry out joint missions as part of a coalition such as in NATO. One of the main challenges of deploying the MIoT in such an environment is to acquire, analyze, and merge vast amounts of data from many different IoT devices and disseminate them in a secure, reliable, and context-dependent manner. This challenge is one of the main challenges in a federated environment and forms the basis for establishing trusting relationships and secure communication between IoT devices belonging to different partners. In this work, we focus on the problem of fulfillment of the data-centric security paradigm, i.e., ensuring the secure management of data along the path from its origin to the recipients and implementing fine-grained access control mechanisms. This problem can be solved using innovative solutions such as applying attribute-based encryption (ABE). In this work, we present a comprehensive solution for secure data dissemination in a federated MIoT environment, enabling the use of distributed registry technology (Hyperledger Fabric), a message broker (Apache Kafka), and data processing microservices implemented using the Kafka Streams API library. We designed and implemented ABE cryptography data access control methods using a combination of pairings-based elliptic curve cryptography and lightweight cryptography and confirmed their suitability for the federations of military networks. Experimental studies indicate that the proposed cryptographic scheme is viable for the number of attributes typically assumed to be used in battlefield networks, offering a good trade-off between security and performance for modern cryptographic applications.