A Decentralized Multi-authority Attribute-based Encryption Scheme via Blockchain for Smart Grid
Chun-Mei Zhang, Zhengang Wang, Li Liu, Guochun Li, Huiming Li · 2023
As digital transformation becomes an increasingly important area in the power systems of china recently, concerns about how to make the conventional power grid more smart have risen. And for a smart power grid, data sharing among different sub-systems should be essential for facilitating the transformation. Since if the data in different sub-systems can be shared efficiently, then an electric power corporation can unite its smart grid systems as a whole system and then make the system smarter. Typically, data in different sub-systems are managed by different access control policies. Traditional single authority attribute-based encryption (ABE) schemes can provide mechanisms for sharing data with a fine-granted access control policy. However, single authority ABE can be problematic since each sub-system can only verify the legality of its own users' attributes. Multi-authority ABE (MA-ABE) where different attribute sets can be under the control of different authorities. A key issue is the trust of the distributed authorization from different sub-systems. Many existing MA-ABE involves a central authority to solve the problem. But a centralized MA-ABE can not fit the distributed systems well. To construct a decentralized MA-ABE scheme, much research suffers from heavy computation costs. To address these problems, we propose a decentralized MA-ABE scheme via blockchain technology. The proposed scheme can well-utilize the existing single authority ABE and is under standard security assumptions. Moreover, we executed the experiment in a live test network of Ethereum to give a real-world test and the results show the proposed scheme is efficient. Compared with a similar scheme, the proposed scheme enjoys less computation cost.