Fine-Grained Access Control in Industrial Internet of Things Evaluating Outsourced Attribute-Based Encryption

Putting Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) to the test, we perform a thorough performance analysis of ABE with outsourced decryption. In order to do so, we implemented a purely Java and Kotlin based Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) system. We specifically focus on the requirements and conditions of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), including attribute revocation and limited computing power. We evaluate our system on both resource-constrained devices and high-performance cloud instances. Furthermore, we compare the overhead of our implementation with classical asymmetric encryption algorithms like RSA and ECC. To demonstrate compatibility with existing solutions, we evaluate our implementation in the Siemens MindSphere IIoT operating system. Our results show that ABE with outsourced decryption can indeed be used in practice in high-security environments, such as the IIoT.