A Lightweight Attribute-based Encryption Scheme for Data Access Control in Smart Grids

Smart grids are envisioned as the next-generation electricity grids. The data measured from the smart grid is very sensitive. It is thus highly necessary to adopt data access control in smart grids to guarantee the security and privacy of the measured data. Due to its flexibility and scalability, attribute-based encryption (ABE) is widely utilized to realize data access control in smart grids. However, most existing ABE solutions impose a heavy decryption overhead on their users. To this end, we propose a lightweight attribute-based encryption scheme for data access control in smart grids by adopting the idea of computation outsourcing. Under our proposed scheme, users can outsource a large amount of computation to a server during the decryption phase while still guaranteeing the security and privacy of the data. Theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation demonstrate that our scheme outperforms the existing schemes by achieving a very low decryption cost.