Efficient Signcryption With Proxy Re-Encryption and its Application in Smart Grid

Smart grid utilizes intelligent metering and other monitoring devices that frequently collect and send a customer's usage report of energy consumption to an energy service provider (ESP). By mere behavioral inference from usage reports, its viable to adjudge the daily routine, location, and the kind of electrical devices of a customer. The collection and transmission of such data raises security concerns. Hence, its vital to secure ESP's access to a customer's data. In perspective of this, we introduce a data access control scheme which is suitable for smart grids with secure customer data access. In our scheme, the customer is a data owner while an ESP or other third party stakeholder (TPS) is the data user. A data user can have secure access to a customer's data via a gateway device such as energy service interface (ESI). The ESI fits in as proxy that re-encrypts data for authorized data users based on the delegation command from the data owner. Here, ESI is unable to acquire plaintext information on the data. Moreover, only authorized data users are eligible for decrypting and verifying the integrity and authentication of data. We achieve the data access control via a certificateless signcryption with proxy re-encryption (CLSPRE) scheme. Detailed security analysis shows that our CLSPRE scheme is secure in the random oracle model (ROM). Moreover, extensive performance evaluation indicates its efficiency with respect to communication overhead and computation complexity.