A Cloud-Assisted Data Processing Scheme for Smart Grid with Flexible Access Control

Compared with traditional power grid, smart grid provides more efficient power transmission and real-time data acquisition. However, data processing in smart grid involves heavy overheads in storage and computation, and user privacy needs to be considered. In order to address these issues, many privacy preserving data aggregation schemes have been proposed for smart grid, and it has been suggested to outsource the computation and storage to the cloud platform for performance improvement. However, most of the existing solutions still suffer some limitations. First, a single cloud server is normally used to process the data, and sensitive information might be leaked if this server is malicious. Second, proper access control is crucial for data protection, but many schemes have not considered this feature. Therefore, the existing solutions still cannot meet the requirements in practical applications. In this paper, we propose a cloud-assisted secure data processing scheme for smart grid with flexible access control. Smart meters use encryption to protect the data, while the decryption is performed in a distributed fashion. Moreover, attribute based encryption (ABE) is applied to realise flexible access control for the power consumption data. Therefore, our scheme achieves both privacy protection and access control. Since most of the expensive operations can be outsourced to the cloud platform, our scheme is very efficient for practical use.