A user-friendly attribute-based data access control scheme for smart grids

Abstract

Smart grids are envisioned as the next-generation electricity grids and can contribute to the overall economic and environmental health of our society. It is evident that effective use of the data measured from the grid is what makes the grid “smart”. Because the smart grid is a major issue of people’s livelihood, the data measured from it is very sensitive. It is thus highly necessary to adopt data access control in smart grids to guarantee the security and privacy of the measured data. Due to its flexibility and scalability, attribute-based encryption (ABE) is widely utilized to realize data access control in smart grids. However, most existing ABE solutions impose a heavy decryption overhead on their users, which hinders the widespread use of data and often causes the data to be left to “sleep” in the repository. To this end, we propose a user-friendly attribute-based data access control scheme for smart grids by adopting the idea of computation outsourcing. Under our proposed scheme, users can outsource a large amount of computation to a server during the decryption phase while still guaranteeing the security and privacy of the data. Theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that our scheme outperforms the existing schemes by achieving a very low decryption cost. We hope that our proposed scheme will facilitate the use of data measured in smart grids.

Keywords

• Data access control
• Smart grid
• Attribute-based encryption