A Privacy-Preserving Searchable Encryption Scheme for Data Protection in Smart Grid

As smart grids continue to evolve at a rapid pace, huge amounts of power data have been collected by various devices in different locations. These enormous power data are of significant research and application value in machine learning. In the meanwhile, the privacy of training data is also becoming urgent to be addressed in the smart grid. Searchable encryption (SE) is an essential solution for protecting data privacy, which can achieve retrieval of ciphertext. In this paper, we present a blockchain-based searchable encryption scheme with fine-grained access control in smart grids. This scheme is designed to enable secure search and access to power data. Firstly, we track data uploads and searches using blockchain technology, which grants data access with transparency and traceability. In addition, in our scheme, the blockchain network stores the encrypted index, which protects the index from malicious tampering. Secondly, our proposed scheme can achieve retrieval of ciphertext while supporting fine-grained access control. Furthermore, Our scheme preserves the privacy of data. Users’ attribute information and keyword information are protected in the data access process. Finally, there is an analysis of the security and advantages of our scheme. Experimental results and comparisons with other schemes show that our scheme is both cost-effective and practice-oriented.