A Secure and Scalable Data Communication Scheme in Smart Grids

Abstract

The concept of smart grid gained tremendous attention among researchers and utility providers in recent years. How to establish a secure communication among smart meters, utility companies, and the service providers is a challenging issue. In this paper, we present a communication architecture for smart grids and propose a scheme to guarantee the security and privacy of data communications among smart meters, utility companies, and data repositories by employing decentralized attribute based encryption. The architecture is highly scalable, which employs an access control Linear Secret Sharing Scheme (LSSS) matrix to achieve a role-based access control. The security analysis demonstrated that the scheme ensures security and privacy. The performance analysis shows that the scheme is efficient in terms of computational cost.