A Hierarchical Attribute-Based Encryption Framework Integrated with Blockchain for Secure Data Sharing in Industrial IoT

Abstract

The development of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) results in colossal amounts of vulnerable operational data that needs to be exchanged safely in distributed logistics networks. Centralized cloud architectures introduce latency, scalability, and privacy bottlenecks. This paper proposes a decentralized hierarchical attribute-based encryption (HABE) scheme that combines edge computing and blockchain to enable privacy-aware, secure data sharing in smart-logistics systems. The system architecture consists of four modules, namely IoT devices, edge servers, cloud storage, and client endpoints, connected through SHA-256 blockchain chaining and HABE-encrypted communication. We give a formal split-key encryption and decryption model for the proposed HABE construction, a complexity analysis of its per-transaction encryption, decryption, communication, and storage costs, and cryptographic parameter sizes consistent with the design. Experimental analysis on a working prototype demonstrates that the prototype implementation's authentication time was reduced by fifty-five percent compared to a centralized scheme, its computation overhead was lower than CP-ABE and comparable to other HABE schemes, and its throughput remained higher than centralized approaches under increasing device counts. The scheme is validated through architectural modeling, a formal algorithmic specification of the end-to-end workflow, and functional testing that demonstrates correctness.