Designing Quantum-Safe Lattice-Based Multi-Authority CP-ABE Scheme for Blockchain-Enabled IoT-Based Consumer Healthcare Electronics

Despite edge computing reducing communication delays associated with cloud computing, privacy concerns remain a significant challenge when sharing data from edge-based consumer electronics (CE) or Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. Ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is a cryptographic tool that facilitates intricate and refined access control. It can deliver more flexible, secure, compact, and effective access control policies for the cloud data. In the case of a conventional CP-ABE scheme, the keys can only be issued and disseminated by a trusted central authority (CA). However, if the CA is compromised, the entire system becomes more susceptible to assaults or failures, which leads to a single-point failure. In this article, we propose a Ring-Learning with Errors (Ring-LWE)-based MA-CP-ABE scheme that is effectively resolved by the multi-authority CP-ABE (MA-CP-ABE), and it ensures the security against quantum attacks. The threshold secret sharing by Shamir and the Lagrange interpolation formula are applied in the key-generation and decryption procedures of the proposed scheme, which make it easier to segment and restore the private keys. The proposed scheme is implemented in the CE-enabled IoT-based smart healthcare applications using the blockchain technology as a secure storage. A detailed comparative study, security analysis and experimental results with the existing relevant schemes shows that the proposed scheme exhibits superior security and better efficiency as compared to other schemes, demonstrating its feasibility in practical IoT-based healthcare applications.