Certificateless Provable Data Possession Scheme Suitable for Smart Grid Management Systems

A large amount of data are generated at each section of the smart grid. Safely and efficiently storing and managing this data is a crucial challenge faced by the smart grid. Cloud-based smart grid management system (CB-SGMS) is a great choice for addressing this problem. Various departments in the smart grid upload the collected data to the cloud for storage. Due to the lack of physical control over the data stored in the cloud, it is a significant issue to judge that the data are intact. Provable data possession (PDP) scheme can solve this problem. Each department sends data to the cloud and entrusts it to a third-party verifier (TPV) to conduct integrity checks on data. In 2018, He et al. put forward a certificateless provable data possession (CL-PDP) scheme for CB-SGMS and professed that their scheme is secure. Unfortunately, we pointed out that there are security flaws in the scheme by showing two concrete attacks. We then came up with an improved scheme to make up for the security flaws. We presented the security requirements and gave the security proofs based on the discrete logarithm problem. In the end, we execute a comparison on performance for the improved scheme and the other five schemes. The results show that the improved scheme is more secure and efficient than other ones, which makes it suitable for CB-SGMS.