A Novel Multi-user Certificateless Searchable Public Key Encryption Scheme for Industrial Internet of Things

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) consists of the application of the Internet and Internet of Things (IoT) to the industrial sector. By integrating a variety of different industrial equipment and sensors, it enables effective data collection and monitoring, ultimately enhancing productivity. As the amount of data increases, most individuals or organizations prefer to store their data to a cloud server. However, more is needed to ensure data security and enable flexible multi-user data sharing. Therefore, in this paper, we design a novel multi-user certificateless searchable public key encryption (MUCLSPE) scheme that can be used for IIoT. The scheme not only can encrypt and search data at the same time, but also can enable flexible multi-user data sharing. Then, the scheme’s security against two types of adversaries is proven in the random oracle model. The performance analysis shows that our scheme has an ideal overall performance based on security properties, computation costs, and communication costs. Finally, we design an application scenario in IIoT using the proposed scheme.