Access Control for the Smart Meters Based on ABE

As more granular sensitive metering data are available in the demand response system, privacy issues are getting more and more attentions recently. The users' habits, behaviors and lifestyles can be deduced by the malicious entities from the energy information such as energy usage data, distributed energy generation and consumption, billing information and so on. In this paper we propose an access control model using ciphertext-policy attribute based encryption (CPABE) to reduce such risks. Specifically, our construction provides entities with different access rights to the fine-grained data stored in the smart meters, as the sensitive information is protected using certain attribute policies.