Efficient certificate-less privacy-preserving techniques for secure smart grid network system

Abstract

The ever increasing digitization of all the operations of the grid has led to the birth of the smart grid (SG), which is an electricity grid equipped with bi-direction flow of both electrical energy and information. The system is empowered with smart devices throughout its segments that utilizes intelligent communication capabilities for different services and applications. However, the high frequency of communication renders the system prone to cyber-attacks as the medium of communication is over a public channel. Therefore, provision of security by design is the ultimate solution to safeguard the SG as it is a critical infrastructure. Nevertheless, the solutions is employed by using cryptographic measures which involve mathematical techniques to realize desirable standards for security, such as data confidentiality, authentication and integrity to prevent cyber-attacks. Various researches have endeavored to address the security and privacy concerns existent in different application scenarios of SG. However, the challenge of balancing between system efficiency and robust security provision rises. For instance, many schemes in SG communication are prone to common attacks or are based on computational intensive mathematical operations. Thus, this work aims at addressing these cyber-concerns with cryptosystems based on elliptic curve cryptography. Elliptic curves are choicest mathematical structures for security designs because their keys have small sizes, and subsequently have reduced storage and transmission requirements. The realization of these security features is based on either public key or private key cryptography or a combination of both, which is called asymmetric cryptography. By using asymmetric cryptography we designed certificate-less cryptosystem to achieve privacy preserving data aggregation and anonymous key agreement in an internet of things (IoT) enhanced SG that removes key escrow problems for the trusted anchor. The proposed schemes have significant comparative advantages over relevant related works in the sense of achieving robust security with optimal computation and communication overhead. The merits of the work are validated by the determination of formal security proofs and performance evaluation respectively