Towards fault-tolerant fine-grained data access control for smart grid

Data access control within smart grids is a challenging issue because of the environmental noise and interferences. On one hand side, fine-grained data access control is essential because illegal access to the sensitive data may cause disastrous implications and/or be prohibited by the law. On the other hand, fault tolerance of the access control is very important, because of the potential impacts (implied by the errors) which could be significantly more serious than the ones regarding general data. In particular, control bits corruption could invalidate the security operation. To address the above challenges, this paper proposes a dedicated data access control scheme that is able to enforce fine-grained access control and resist against the corruptions implied by the noisy channels and the environmental interferences. The proposed scheme exploits a state-of-the-art cryptographic primitive called Fuzzy identity-based encryption with the lattice based access control and dedicated error-correction coding. We evaluate our proposed scheme by extensive simulations in terms of error correcting capability and energy consumption and results show the efficiency and feasibility of the proposed scheme. To our best knowledge, this paper is the first which addresses fault tolerant fine-grained data access control for smart grid.