Abstract: The basic security mechanism in publish/subscribe system is highly challenging and difficult to achieve due to the loose coupling of publishers and subscribers. This paper presents a novel approach to provide confidentiality and authentication in a broker-less content based publish/subscribe system using identity-based encryption techniques, by adapting pairing-based cryptography and also uses a lightweight encryption scheme, P-Coding, to provide confidentiality in an energy efficient way. This paper also preserves the weak subscription confidentiality in publish/subscribe system. The overall approach provides fine-grained key management and the cost for encryption, decryption and routing is in the order of subscribed attributes. It reduces the energy consumed by data encryption.

Keywords: Content-based, publish/subscribe, broker-less, identity-based encryption, security.