Attribute-Based Secure Data Sharing with Hidden Policies in Smart Grid

Abstract

Smart grid uses intelligent transmission and distribution networks to deliver electricity. It aims to improve the electric system's reliability, security, and efficiency through two-way communication of consumption data and dynamic optimization of electric-system operations, maintenance, and planning. The smart grid systems use fine-grained power grid measurements to provide increased grid stability and reliability. Key to achieving this is securely sharing the measurements among grid entities over wide area networks. Typically, such sharing follows policies that depend on data generator and consumer preferences and on time-sensitive contexts. In smart grid, as well as the data, policies for sharing the data may be sensitive because they directly contain sensitive information, and reveal information about underlying data protected by the policy, or about the data owner or recipients. In this study, we propose an attribute-based data sharing scheme in smart grid. Not only the data but also the access policies are obfuscated in grid operators' point of view during the data sharing process. Thus, the data privacy and policy privacy are preserved in the proposed scheme. The access policy can be expressed with any arbitrary access formula. Thus, the expressiveness of the policy is enhanced. The security is also improved such that the unauthorized key generation center or the grid manage systems that store the data cannot decrypt the data to be shared. The computation overhead of recipients are also reduced by delegating most of the laborious decryption operations to the more powerful grid manage systems.