A policy-hidden CP-ABE access control scheme for the Internet of Things (IoT) that integrates a multi-secret sharing algorithm

Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) has been widely adopted for securing the Internet of Things (IoT). However, traditional CP-ABE schemes still face several limitations in IoT data sharing. First, the plaintext access policy embedded in the ciphertext poses a risk of privacy leakage. Moreover, traditional CP-ABE schemes typically rely on a single secret sharing mechanism, which necessitates repeated transmissions to share large volumes of data. This leads to low efficiency in data sharing, making such schemes unsuitable for IoT environments. To address these issues, this paper proposes a policy-hidden CP-ABE access control scheme for the IoT that integrates a multi-secret sharing algorithm. The scheme employs multi-secret sharing techniques to enable secure and efficient data sharing, and adopts a hash-based encryption strategy to realize complete policy hiding. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves strong security and performance, making it well-suited for resource-constrained IoT environments.