Title: Privacy-preserving cloud-agent pub-sub system with decentralised authorisation and bilateral fine-grained access control

Authors: Weihu Cao; Linming Gong; Runmeng Du; Hui Hao

Addresses: School of Computer Science, School of Cybersecurity, Xi'an Polytechnic University, Xi'an, China ' School of Computer Science, School of Cybersecurity, Xi'an Polytechnic University, Xi'an, China ' School of Computer Science, School of Cybersecurity, Xi'an Polytechnic University, Xi'an, China ' School of Computer Science, School of Cybersecurity, Xi'an Polytechnic University, Xi'an, China

Abstract: With the growth of publish/subscribe systems (PSS), service providers increasingly outsource their computation and storage to cloud servers, but meanwhile incur some privacy risks such as data leakage, identity exposure, and subscription inference. Existing privacy-preserving PSS solutions rely on centralised authorisation and lack bilateral access control, leading to single points of failure and limited subscriber-side data governance. To address these gaps, this paper proposes a decentralised matching attribute-based encryption (DC-MABE) scheme. Building upon this, we construct a privacy-preserving PSS that supports distributed key management and enables fine-grained bilateral access control for both publishers and subscribers. Formal security analysis demonstrates that the scheme achieves indistinguishability under chosen-plaintext attacks (IND-CPA). Experimental results show that our solution offers a favourable balance between efficiency and security compared with state-of-the-art schemes.

Keywords: privacy preservation; publish-subscribe systems; decentralised authorisation; attribute-based encryption; ABE.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICS.2026.154875

International Journal of Information and Computer Security, 2026 Vol.30 No.3, pp.308 - 332

Received: 03 Jul 2025
Accepted: 13 Dec 2025
Published online: 16 Jul 2026 *

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