Abstract Recently, Internet of Things devices (IoT) have become a hot spot for researchers. Their industrial importance is growing exponentially day after day. Statistics show that the number of IoT devices will reach fifty billions by 2020. In addition, IoT applications are backed through the Cloud where data is stored and processed by gigantic processing systems. However, since the Cloud is honest but curious, sensitive information belonging to the IoT devices owners might be accessed and used beyond the intended purpose. Therefore, data privacy on Cloud servers should be preserved, which means that they should not reveal any piece of personally identifiable information (PII). Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) is a new form of public key encryption. ABE is a good candidate to achieve privacy and fine-grained access control for IoT applications running on Cloud servers. However, performing all the related cryptographic operations on such devices is practically infeasible because of their resource constraints. For alleviating all the computation burden on these resource-limited devices, several schemes have been proposed. In this paper, we investigate different ABE schemes, we implement and provide a performance evaluation in order to compare two relevant CP-ABE schemes: a fully encryption Vs a delegation based alternative.