Towards Privacy-aware IoT Communications: Delegable, Revocable, and Efficient

The Internet of Things (IoT) is widely recognized for its potential to enhance efficiency and productivity across various industries. However, its increasing prevalence has also made it a more attractive target for cybercriminals. While many advanced cryptographic solutions have been developed to secure IoT, some practical security and privacy issues such as self-sovereign delegation, flexible revocation, and lightweight access remain inadequately addressed in existing solutions. In this paper, we propose PLIC, a Privacy-aware Lightweight IoT Communication scheme, which not only enables any authorized user to flexibly delegate their lightweight access privileges to other delegatees, such that they can also access the authorized IoT targets in the same lightweight way, but also supports flexible revocation of access for specific users without affecting non-revoked users. Specifically, our solution leverages wildcard-based access control and tree-based encryption technologies to enable self-sovereign delegation, dynamic membership updates, and stably efficient decryption overhead in IoT. In addition, comprehensive security proofs are rendered to validate the robustness of our approach. Finally, experimental comparisons with similar methodologies demonstrate the practicality and superior performance of our solution, which indicates its effectiveness for practical IoT appli-cations.