Edge-assisted and energy-efficient access control for dynamic users group in smart grids

Smart grids represent a transformative evolution in energy distribution, enabling bidirectional electricity flow, automation, and real-time data analysis. However, with large volumes of sensitive data becoming attractive targets for cyberattacks, the seamless data access in smart grids presents security challenges. Attribute-based encryption (ABE) offers one-to-many energy-efficient access control but faces inefficiency and revocation challenges in smart grid environments. This paper presents an edge-assisted, efficient ABE scheme to address these issues, which provides an efficient direct user revocation mechanism for dynamic user groups in smart grids, and employs edge-assisted computation to reduce decryption costs. It also gives rigorous security proofs, and the theoretical and experimental results show the practicality of smart grids and superiority over related representative works.