Toward Delay-Tolerant Flexible Data Access Control for Smart Grid with Renewable Energy Resources

In the smart grid with renewable energy resources (RERs), the residential units (RUs) with distributed energy resources are considered to be both power consumers and suppliers. Specifically, RUs with excessive renewable generations can trade with the utility in deficit of power supplies for mutual benefits. It causes two challenging issues. First, the trading data of RUs are quite sensitive, which should be only accessed by authorized users with fine-grained policies. Second, the behaviors of the RUs to generate trading data are spontaneous and unpredictable, and then the problem is how to guarantee system efficiency and delay tolerance simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a delay-tolerant flexible data access control scheme based on key policy attribute-based encryption for smart grid with RERs. We adopt the secret-sharing scheme to realize a flexible access control with encryption delay tolerance. Furthermore, there is no central trusted server to perform the encryption/decryption. We reduce the computation cost on RUs and operators via a semitrusted model. The analysis shows that the proposed scheme can meet the data security requirement of the smart grid with RERs, and it also has less cost compared with other popular models.