An Attribute-Based Secure and Scalable Scheme for Data Communications in Smart Grids

The concept of Smart Grid gains tremendous attention amongst researchers and utility providers in recent years. One of the challenges is to establish a secure communication architecture among smart meters, utility companies, and third-party service providers, whilst address the prevalent security and privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose a communication architecture for smart grids, and design a scheme to secure the data communications among smart meters, utility companies, and third-party service providers by employing Decentralized Ciphertext-Policy Attribute Based Encryption (CP_ABE) to store the data in ciphertext format, hence ensuring data security. The architecture we proposed is high scalable since the decentralized feature. Also, our architecture achieves an role-based access control by employing an access control LSSS matrix that describes the attributes required to access the data. We analyze the proposed scheme, and argue that it provides message authenticity and collusion resistance, and is efficient and feasible.