A Symmetry-Enhanced Secure and Traceable Data Sharing Model Based on Decentralized Information Flow Control for the End–Edge–Cloud Paradigm

The End–Edge–Cloud (EEC) paradigm hierarchically orchestrates Internet of Things (IoT) devices, edge nodes, and cloud, optimizing system performance for both delay-sensitive data and compute-intensive processing tasks. Securing IoT data sharing in the EEC-driven paradigm while maintaining data traceability poses critical challenges. In this paper we propose STDSM, a symmetry-enhanced secure and traceable data sharing model for the EEC-driven data sharing paradigm. STDSM enables IoT data owners to share data securely by attaching symmetric security labels (for secrecy and integrity) to their data. This mechanism symmetrically controls both data outflow and inflow. Furthermore, STDSM can also track data user identity. Subsequently, the security properties of STDSM, including data confidentiality, integrity, and identity traceability, are formally verified; the verification takes 280 ms, using a novel approach that combines High-Level Petri Net modeling with the satisfiability modulo theories library and the Z3 solver. In addition, our experimental results show that STDSM reduces time overhead by up to 15% while providing enhanced traceability.