Fine-Grained Forward Secure Firmware Update in Smart Home

Abstract

Although the vigorous development of smart homes brings great convenience to people’s lives, smart homes usually suffer from various security threats due to firmware vulnerabilities. Firmware update is a possible solution, but existing methods cannot address the security issues during the update process well. To enable secure firmware updates, a Forward Secure Firmware Update (FSFU) system was realized based on the proposed Puncturable-Ciphertext Policy-Attribute-Based Encryption (P-CP-ABE) scheme. In FSFU, when the service provider delivers the latest firmware, it specifies an access policy and some tags to encrypt the data and appends its signature to achieve both fine-grained access control and authentication. Authorized customers can obtain the latest firmware by decrypting the encrypted data through their private key. In particular, after a successful update, each authorized customer can realize forward security by updating his/her puncturable key, which is an important private key component. In addition, FSFU is further enhanced by outsourcing a part of the parameters and computational tasks. Finally, FSFU was proven to be secure under the Decisional Bilinear Diffie–Hellman (DBDH) assumption. Our proposed FSFU is efficient from both the theoretical analysis and the experimental results.

Keywords

• firmware update
• forward secure
• fine-grained access
• authentication
• outsourcing