Provably Secure Data Sharing Scheme with Cloud Using Homomorphic with Weighted Attribute-Based Searchable Encryption

The convenience and cost-effectiveness of cloud services make data sharing an attractive option. Attribute-based Encryption (ABE) has gained great attention as it can enable fine-grained access control in data sharing. However, conventional ABE schemes suffer from poor data security and high computational overhead, which makes them unsuitable for mobile devices with limited resources. Generally, current approaches fail to address the challenges of fine-grained access control and do not significantly improve the data owner’s efficiency during the sharing process. Moreover, ensuring the long-term security of cloud-stored data remains a critical concern in traditional approaches. To handle such challenges, this work developed an attribute-based secure data-sharing scheme to provide higher security in a cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) environment. The aim of this developed approach is to enhance computational efficiency and data security for mobile devices. Initially, Homomorphic with Weighted Attribute-based Searchable Encryption (HWASE) is introduced to provide higher security to the data. It effectively provides fine-grained access according to the keyword search over the encoded data, which enables the data owner to retrieve the ciphertext based on the keywords. After that, the chameleon hashing function is introduced for performing encryption in an offline manner by generating immediate ciphertexts. This newly developed ABE is suitable for resource-limited mobile users. The key findings include the development of an HWASE system for secure, fine-grained access control through keyword searches on encoded data, and the use of a chameleon hashing function to enable efficient offline encryption suitable for mobile devices. An extensive performance evaluation is finally executed to ensure the data security of the approach by using various validation measures. The memory size of the developed model is 5.9[Formula: see text]MB, and the encryption time is 121[Formula: see text]ms for considering the block size as 15[Formula: see text]KB, which ensures effective encryption performance when analyzed with the baseline methods.