Assured Data Deletion with Fine-grained Access Control for Fog-based Industrial Applications

The advances of cloud computing, fog computing and Internet of Things (IoT) make the industries more prosperous than ever. A wide range of industrial systems such as transportation systems and manufacturing systems have been developed by integrating cloud computing, fog computing and IoT successfully. Security and privacy issues are a major concern that hinders the wide adoptions of these novel techniques. In this paper, we focus on assured data deletion, an issue which is important but received less attention in academia and industry. We firstly propose a framework to integrate the cloud, the fog and the things together to manage the stored data from industries or individuals. We then focus on secure data deletion in this framework by proposing an assured data deletion scheme which fulfills fine-grained access control over sensitive data and verifiable data deletion. Only the data owners and the fog devices are involved when deleting a data key and validating the data deletion, which makes the protocol practical due to the features of low latency and real-time interaction of fog computing. The proposed protocol takes advantage of attribute-based encryption and is provably secure under the standard model. The theoretical analysis shows the good performance and functionality requirements while the implementation results demonstrate the feasibility of our proposal.