A Multi-Authority Attribute-Based Signcryption Scheme with Efficient Revocation for Smart Grid Downlink Communication
This work addresses security challenges for smart grid downlink communications, such as firmware updates and load control, but is incremental as it builds on existing attribute-based and revocation methods.
The paper tackles secure multicast communication in smart grids by proposing a multi-authority attribute-based signcryption scheme with efficient revocation, achieving confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation while demonstrating low computational overhead in experiments on an AMI testbed.
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.