A Multi-Authority Attribute-Based Signcryption Scheme with Efficient Revocation for Smart Grid Downlink Communication

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a multi-authority attribute-based signcryption scheme with efficient revocation for smart grid downlink communications. In the proposed scheme, grid operators and electricity vendors can send multicast messages securely to different groups of consumers which is required in different applications such as firmware update distribution and sending direct load control messages. Our scheme can ensure the confidentiality and the integrity of the multicasted messages, allows consumers to authenticate the source of the multicasted messages, achieves and non-repudiation property, and allows prompt revocation, simultaneously which are required for the smart grid downlink communications. Our security analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme can thwart various security threats to the smart grid. Our experiments conducted on an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) testbed confirm that the proposed scheme has low computational overhead.

ECS‐CP‐ABE: A lightweight elliptic curve signcryption scheme based on ciphertext‐policy attribute‐based encryption to secure downlink multicast communication in edge envisioned advanced metering infrastructure networks

“…A recent multiauthority attribute‐based signcryption scheme to ensures confidentiality, authenticity, and nonrepudiation for downlink communication in the smart grid networks is proposed in Reference 16. It is a CP‐ABE that is based on linear secret sharing and matrix access policy, yet it incorporates signer identity attribute to the monotone Boolean formula to generate the signcrypted text.…”

“…In this section, we evaluate the efficiency of the proposed ECS‐CP‐ABE scheme in terms of message size, communication overhead and computation complexity. We compare the performance of our protocol with the three CP‐ABE schemes, the decentralized multiauthority ABE 22 and two CP‐ABE schemes proposed to secure AMI communications presented in References 16,28. We will refer to the three schemes as D‐CP‐ABE, 22 DSF, 28 and MA‐ABSC, 16 respectively.…”

“…We compare the performance of our protocol with the three CP‐ABE schemes, the decentralized multiauthority ABE 22 and two CP‐ABE schemes proposed to secure AMI communications presented in References 16,28. We will refer to the three schemes as D‐CP‐ABE, 22 DSF, 28 and MA‐ABSC, 16 respectively. The notations used in this section is shown in Table 2.…”

“…For the experiments, we used an HP laptop with Intel I7 processor running at 2.8 GHz and 16 GB RAM. We choose Type 1 symmetric pairing ( G 1 × G 1 → G T ) with 512‐bits SuperSingular curve to implement the pairing‐based protocols 16,22,28 . For the implementation of our protocol, we used the 160‐bits curve secp160k1 E : y 2 = x 3 + 7 with the recommended parameters in Reference 44 over a finite field size 512‐bits.…”

“…However, the unique characteristics of the metering devices in addition to the strict requirements of AMI applications hinder the adoption of common security measures 14 . There exists an extensive research that have been conducted to address the security issues and threats in AMI networks, yet very few 15‐17 took into account the different communication models needed to implement the desired functionality. In AMI networks, data communication can be either uplink or downlink.…”