Towards Delay-Tolerant Flexible Data Access Control for Smart Grid with Renewable Energy Resources

TL;DR

This paper presents a delay-tolerant, flexible data access control scheme using KP-ABE and secret sharing for smart grids with renewable energy, ensuring security and efficiency without a central trusted server.

Contribution

It introduces a novel delay-tolerant access control scheme based on KP-ABE and secret sharing that reduces computation costs and enhances security in smart grids with renewable resources.

Findings

The scheme guarantees data security for smart grid trading data.

It reduces computational costs on users and operators.

The scheme is more cost-effective than existing models.

Abstract

In the Smart Grid with Renewable Energy Resources (RERs), the Residential Units (RUs) with Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) are considered to be both power consumers and suppliers. Specifically, RUs with excessive renewable generations can trade with the utility in deficit of power supplies for mutual benefits. It causes two challenging issues. First, the trading data of RUs is quite sensitive, which should be only accessed by authorized users with fine-grained policies. Second, the behaviors of the RUs to generate trading data are spontaneous and unpredictable, then the problem is how to guarantee system efficiency and delay tolerance simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a delay-tolerant flexible data access control scheme based on Key Policy Attribute Based Encryption (KP-ABE) for Smart Grid with Renewable Energy Resources (RERs). We adopt the secret sharing scheme (SSS) to realize a flexible access control with encryption delay tolerance. Furthermore, there is no central trusted server to perform the encryption/decryption. We reduce the computation cost on RUs and operators via a semi-trusted model. The analysis shows that the proposed scheme can meet the data security requirement of the Smart Grid with RERs, and it also has less cost compared with other popular models.