Access control for a Smart Grid SOA

In the future Smart Grid numerous stakeholders within the electric power grid need to exchange information in order to realize applications like customer energy feedback, billing and invoicing of variable tariffs, demand side management and efficient charging of electric vehicles. Using a Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) based on Web services promises a convenient way to provide a data infrastructure capable to realize the required interactions in a flexible way. A main concern in such an architecture is how access to data can be controlled in order to prevent security or privacy violations. Access control depends strongly on authentication and authorization mechanisms. Therefore this paper contributes i) a SOA for the Smart Grid and ii) an access control mechanism that is taken into consideration from the early beginning of the system design. Furthermore, a proof of concept implementation and a scalability analysis are used to investigate the requirements on computational resources in a large scale deployment.