An efficient attribute based encryption scheme in smart grid

Abstract

To protect the smart grid data sharing, a flexible access control strategy, the Ciphertext Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) can be adopted, which often cost huge computational overheads. Hence, how to balance the efficiency and the level of security provided is of considerable importance. In this paper, we propose Co-CPABE, a cooperative CP-ABE scheme for smart grid. In our scheme, the heavy encryption computation tasks are dispersed to several data owners. Concretely, the access tree can be computed independently and simultaneously. As a result, the encryption is implemented by the cooperation of data owners and the Central Authority (CA), in which the CA only performs simple calculations such as multiplication and division. Moreover, an enhanced scheme is introduced to further improve the encryption efficiency. Finally, Co-CPABE is proved to be secure as well as efficient.