BROKER-LESS PUBLISH/SUBSCRIBE SYSTEMS WITH IDENTITY-BASED ENCRYPTION

In publish/subscribe (pub/sub) communication, Publishers inject information into the pub/sub system, and subscribers specify the events of interest by means of subscriptions. Published events are routed to their relevant subscribers, without the publishers knowing the relevant set of subscribers, or vice versa. This abstract presents a novel approach to provide confidentiality and authentication in a broker-less content-based publish/subscribe system. The authentication of publishers and subscribers as well as confidentiality of events is ensured, by adapting the pairing-based cryptography mechanisms, to the needs of a publish/subscribe system. Furthermore, an algorithm to cluster subscribers according to their subscriptions preserves a weak notion of subscription confidentiality. In addition to our previous work, this abstract contributes 1) use of searchable encryption to enable efficient routing of encrypted events, 2) multi credential routing a new event dissemination strategy to strengthen the weak subscription confidentiality, and 3) thorough analysis of different attacks on subscription confidentiality. The overall approach provides fine-grained key management and the cost for encryption, decryption, and routing is in the order of subscribed attributes. Moreover, the evaluations show that providing security is affordable w.r.t. 1) throughput of the proposed cryptographic primitives, and 2) delays incurred during the construction of the publish/subscribe overlay and the event dissemination.