A homomorphic approach for security and privacy preservation of Smart Airports

The concept of Smart Airport is emerging in the Aviation sector because of the industry 4.0 revolution. To provide the best facility to the air travelers, most of the airports have enhanced their infrastructure using smart automation and Cloud Services (CS), etc. which play a significant role in increasing the revenue of the aviation industry. As the use of digital technology at airports is increasing, they are becoming progressively vulnerable to cyber-attacks and data breaches. The data collected by the airports is stored in specialized cloud databases, which ensures the availability of the data at any time. However, cloud servers have been compromised several times which leads to a lack of trust by the consumers. To meet the privacy and security objectives of the data collected at the airports and stored in the cloud, this research proposes a Searchable Encryption (SE) scheme based on Partial Homomorphic Encryption (PHE). The proposed scheme allows users to search on the encrypted data stored in the cloud hence enhancing the usability of the encrypted data. In this paper, a Single Keyword Searchable Encryption (SKSE) scheme is presented which is implemented using Paillier Cryptosystem. The proposed scheme comprises of two variants (a) Secure SKSE (b) Efficient SKSE. The Secure SKSE scheme exploits the probabilistic properties of the Paillier cryptosystem, whereas, the Efficient SKSE scheme is lightweight as it is based on the deterministic properties of the Paillier cryptosystem. Both variants of SKSE scheme are deployed on a public cloud platform “Contabo” and tested on the real-world aviation data to assess the performance of both approaches. The security and performance analysis illustrates that the proposed Secure SKSE maintains a high-security level by providing probabilistic encryption and trapdoors. On the other hand, the Efficient SKSE is 84 times faster in terms of performance.