Enabling fine-grained access control with efficient attribute revocation and policy updating in smart grid

Abstract

In smart grid, electricity consumption data may be handed over to a third party for various purposes. While government regulations and industry compliance prevent utility companies from improper or illegal sharing of their customers’ electricity consumption data, there are some scenarios where it can be very useful. For example, it allows the consumers’ data to be shared among various energy resources so the energy resources are able to analyze the data and adjust their operation to the actual power demand. However, it is crucial to protect sensitive electricity consumption data during the sharing process. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained access control scheme (FAC) with efficient attribute revocation and policy updating in smart grid. Specifically, by introducing the concept of Third-party Auditor (TPA), the proposed FAC achieves efficient attribute revocation. Also, we design an efficient policy updating algorithm by outsourcing the computational task to a cloud server. Moreover, we give security analysis and conduct experiments to demonstrate that the FAC is both secure and efficient compared with existing ABE-based approaches.