{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,11,5]],"date-time":"2025-11-05T14:40:03Z","timestamp":1762353603086,"version":"build-2065373602"},"reference-count":33,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"2","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2025,2,14]],"date-time":"2025-02-14T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1739491200000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","award":["62462044"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["62462044"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Symmetry"],"abstract":"<jats:p>In smart grids, power monitoring equipment produces large volumes of data that are exchanged between microgrids and the main grid. This data exchange can potentially expose users\u2019 private information, including their living habits and economic status. Therefore, implementing secure and effective data access control mechanisms is crucial. Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) is a widely used encryption scheme in distributed systems, offering fine-grained access control. However, in CP-ABE systems, malicious users might leak decryption keys to third parties, creating a significant security threat. Thus, there is an urgent need for tracing mechanisms to identify and track these malicious users. Moreover, tracing and user revocation are complementary processes. Although using a binary tree for user revocation is efficient, it limits the number of users. This paper suggests an access control scheme that combines CP-ABE with blockchain to overcome these limitations, leveraging blockchain\u2019s tamper-resistant features. This scheme enables user revocation, tracing, partial policy hiding, and ciphertext searchability, and it has been proven secure. Simulation results show that our approach reduces time overhead by 24% to 68%, compared to other solutions. While some solutions are similar in efficiency to ours, our approach offers more comprehensive functionality and better meets the security requirements of smart grids.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/sym17020294","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,2,14]],"date-time":"2025-02-14T11:14:41Z","timestamp":1739531681000},"page":"294","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":1,"title":["An Efficient Traceable and Revocable Access Control Scheme for Smart Grids"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"17","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-8523-9595","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Ye","family":"Lu","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computer & Communication, Lanzhou University of Technology, Lanzhou 730050, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0007-6704-7793","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Hao","family":"Wang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computer & Communication, Lanzhou University of Technology, Lanzhou 730050, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Xiaomei","family":"Jin","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computer & Communication, Lanzhou University of Technology, Lanzhou 730050, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,2,14]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"2589","DOI":"10.1016\/j.renene.2019.08.092","article-title":"A survey on smart grid technologies and applications","volume":"146","author":"Dileep","year":"2020","journal-title":"Renew. 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