Secure and Distributed Access Control for Dynamic Pervasive Edge Computing Services

Lingshuang Liu, Cheng Huang, Dan Zhu, Dongxiao Liu, Jianbing Ni, Xuemin Sherman Shen

Abstract: Pervasive edge computing (PEC) integrates the re-sources of peer devices at the network edge to serve users' latency-sensitive computation needs. Due to the high dynamics of the PEC environment, it is very challenging to achieve efficient service access control of edge servers and users without an “always-online” centralized server. In this paper, we propose a secure, efficient, and distributed service access control frame-work (SE-DAC) in the PEC environment. Specifically, SE-DAC extends the key-aggregate cryptosystem to achieve batch service authorization, where the service provider aggregates the access keys of different services to produce a constant-size aggregate key for the edge servers. Meanwhile, user authentication tasks are delegated to the edge servers by integrating secret sharing. The mutual authentication between the edge servers and the users is based on zero-round trip communication, such that the communication bandwidth cost is low. In addition, the service provider can efficiently revoke the authorization of the dropout or compromised edge servers in response to the dynamics of the PEC environment. Finally, we conduct numerical analysis and experiments to demonstrate that SE-DAC is highly computational efficient on service authorization, authentication, and revocation.