Secure Data Access Control with Fair Accountability in Smart Grid Data Sharing: An Edge Blockchain Approach

Abstract

Nowadays, the advance of smart grid technology has fostered the development of microgrids, which can efficiently control and manage the distributed energy resources (DERs). In smart grid, IoT devices generate huge amounts of data, which are collected and shared among DERs, microgrids, and the main grid. To protect the shared data, it is necessary to implement the secure and efficient data access control. Ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is a promising solution for the distributed system. However, lightweight IoT devices with limited computing capability cannot handle the computationally intensive ABE algorithms. To overcome this constraint, the decryption phase of CP-ABE is usually outsourced to the cloud, but this is inefficient and not safe enough in the distributed environment. In this article, we propose an edge blockchain empowered secure data access control scheme with fair accountability for the smart grid. The computation workloads of end user devices are outsourced to the edge nodes in a consortium blockchain system We adopt an on-chain/off-chain approach to ensure the flexible data sharing. Additionally, we adopt the threshold secret sharing scheme to establish a distributed authority. The security analysis and performance evaluation are conducted to prove the security and efficiency of our scheme. We use the Raspberry Pi to simulate lightweight IoT devices in the Hyperledger fabric platform to prove the usability of our scheme.