ESO: An efficient and secure outsourcing scheme for smart grid

Abstract

Smart grid has emerged as the second generation of power grid, to provide utility companies with full visibility and pervasive control over their assets and services, to be self-healing from system anomalies and resilient against system damages, and to perform energy transactions across the system. To achieve these properties, there are many communications in smart grid, among which is the one between control center and markets. The content in the communications are closely related to information about users' privacy, which needs to be protected. In addition, due to the large number of markets requesting for data, control center is heavily loaded due to tremendous tasks, e.g., aggregating the electricity reports periodically, checking each access permission and encrypting data according to each access policy, etc. Therefore, there is a great need to utilize an efficient fine-grained access technology. Currently, privacy preserving and fine-grained access control in this communication have not been studied well. To address these issues, we propose an efficient and secure outsourcing scheme, named ESO in smart grid. ESO achieves fine-grained access control with a low workload in both control center and markets by utilizing attribute-based encryption and proxy re-encryption techniques. Control center can outsource encrypted data to a proxy cloud platform and the platform can do the verification and distribution of data without leaking any privacy. Thus mitigate the workload in control center. After extensive analysis, we demonstrate that ESO can achieve security goals with a low workload in both control center and markets.