Timed-release and partially private access control for decentralized IoT collaboration systems

Decentralized Internet of Things (IoT) collaborative systems necessitate robust access control mechanisms to coordinate collaborative computing and access management in decentralized environments. While functional encryption, as one of the access control technologies, demonstrates promising potential for collaborative ecosystems, existing centralized architectures suffer from single-point failure vulnerabilities and an absence of time access control - critical limitations in decentralized IoT collaboration frameworks. This paper introduces a novel access control paradigm addressing these decentralized system challenges through two key innovations: a trust authority-free decentralized key generation framework, and the implementation of time-constrained decryption policies that protect computational outputs in encrypted form prior to predetermined disclosure periods. Specifically, our technology enables individual clients to autonomously generate local cryptographic key pairs, encrypt data, and negotiate time parameters for result publication. The decryption phase aggregates encrypted data and partial decryption keys from multiple clients to ultimately enable data accessibility. We present a concrete implementation and evaluate it under both idealized and resource-constrained simulation environments, confirming the system’s practicality even with 100 clients in simulated IoT setups.