Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) is a powerful cryptographic tool that allows fine-grained access control over data. Due to its features, ABE has been adopted in several applications, such as encrypted storage or access control systems. Recently, researchers argued about the non acceptable performance of ABE when implemented on mobile devices. Indeed, the non feasibility of ABE on mobile devices would hinder the deployment of novel protocols and services--that could instead exploit the full potential of such devices. However, we believe the conclusion of non usability was driven by a not-very efficient implementation. In this paper, we want to shine a light on this concern by studying the feasibility of applying ABE on smartphone devices. In particular, we implemented AndrABEn, an ABE library for Android operating system. Our library is written in the C language and implements two main ABE schemes: Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption, and Key- Policy Attribute-Based Encryption. We also run a thorough set of experimental evaluation for AndrABEn, and compare it with the current state-of-the-art (considering the same experimental setting). The results confirm the possibility to effectively use ABE on smartphone devices, requiring an acceptable amount of resources in terms of computations and energy consumption. Since the current state-of-the-art claims the non feasibility of ABE on mobile devices, we believe that our study (together with the AndrABEn library that we made available online) is a key result that will pave the way for researchers and developers to design and implement novel protocols and applications for mobile devices.
Along the same line of studies, we also proposed a system for efficient software updates distribution, over untrusted distribution networks in @cite_1 . We used CP-ABE to guarantee flexible access control. In this work, we only provided evaluations measured on a laptop device with two 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs. Based on our experimental results, the CP-ABE encryption and decryption time for five attributes are 77.47 ms and 32.62 ms, respectively. We realized that not providing a proper feasibility assessment is a big limitation for this type of proposals. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap and pave the way for developing further solutions assuming the feasibility of ABE for mobile devices.
@cite_1
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With the ever increasing number of connected devices and the over abundance of data generated by these devices, data privacy has become a critical concern in the Internet of Things (IoT). One promising privacy-preservation approach is Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE), a public key encryption scheme that enables fine-grained access control, scalable key management and flexible data distribution. This paper presents an in-depth performance evaluation of ABE that focuses on execution time, data and network overhead, energy consumption, and CPU and memory usage. We evaluate two major types of ABE, Key-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (KP-ABE) and Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE), on different classes of mobile devices including a laptop and a smartphone. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive study of ABE dedicated solely to its performance. Our results provide insights into important practical issues of ABE, including what computing resources ABE requires in heterogeneous environments, at what cost ABE offers benefits, and under what situations ABE is best suited for use in the IoT.