ESVPH: Efficient Searchable and Verifiable Data Sharing Scheme With Partial Hidden Policy for IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a key engine of global socio-economic transformation, where data sharing stands as a central catalyst for the IoT market’s growth. However, data security and privacy concerns significantly impede the advancement of IoT data sharing. Consequently, Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE), offering fine-grained access control, is increasingly favored by data users. Unfortunately, existing ABE schemes still face these drawbacks: (1) the encryption and decryption computation overhead grows linearly with attributes; (2) keyword searches within ciphertexts are intricate and inefficient; (3) the access policy is at higher risk of privacy disclosure. To address these issues, this paper presents an efficient searchable and verifiable scheme with partial hidden policy for IoT (ESVPH). This scheme not only provides flexible keyword-based search and re-encryption verification, but also achieves fixed costs for encryption, decryption, searching and verifying. Additionally, ESVPH introduces an access policy where attribute names are disclosed while their values remain concealed, thereby enhancing user privacy. In conclusion, the scheme offers outstanding performance in computation and communication, proving its feasibility for practical IoT data sharing through rigorous proofs and extensive experimentation.