In recent years, the growth of IoT applications is rapid in nature and widespread across several domains. This tremendous growth of IoT applications leads to various security and privacy concerns. The existing security algorithms fail to provide improved security features across IoT devices due to its resource constrained nature (inability to handle a huge amount of data). In this context, the authors propose a cloud-assisted proxy re-encryption scheme for efficient data sharing across IoT systems. The proposed approach solves the root extraction problem using near-ring. This improves the security measures of the system. The security analysis of the proposed approach states that it provides improved security with lesser computational overheads. © 2020 IGI Global.