Decentralizing access control system for data sharing in smart grid

Smart grid enhances the intelligence of the traditional power grid, which allows sharing varied data such as consumer, production, or energy with service consumers. Due to the untrustworthy networks, there exist potential security threats (e.g., unauthorized access and modification, malicious data theft) hindering the development of smart grid. While several access control schemes have been proposed for smart grid to achieve sensitive data protection and fine-grained identity management, most of them cannot satisfy the requirements of decentralizing smart grid environment and suffer from key escrow problems. In addition, some existing solutions cannot achieve dynamic user management for lacking the privilege revocation mechanism. In this paper, we propose a decentralizing access control system with user revocation to relieve the above problems. We design a new multiple-authority attribute-based encryption (MABE) scheme to keep data confidentiality and adapt decentralizing smart grid applications. We also compare our proposal with the similar solution from both security and performance. The comparing results show that our access control system can achieve a trade-off among confidentiality, authentication, distribution and efficiency in smart grid.