LHSC-SGC: A lightweight hybrid signcryption scheme for smart grid communications in heterogeneous cryptographic public-key systems

Abstract

For smart grid communications (SGC), ensuring the transmission security of power consumption data is crucial to prevent unauthorized access and achieve the undeniability (unforgeability) of the data. In this context, signcryption is particularly important for SGC because it combines signature and encryption in a scheme to provide both unforgeability and confidentiality for data transmission while reducing computational complexity. Nowadays, based on different cryptographic public-key systems (CPKSs), many signcryption schemes have been proposed, but they are applied to a single CPKS. When an original CPKS is upgraded to another new CPKS, all associated cryptographic mechanisms must be rewritten to ensure that all users (i.e., original, upgraded and new users) can operate all functionalities normally in such heterogeneous CPKSs. However, the existing signcryption schemes lack the heterogeneously compatible property that makes them unsuitable for heterogeneous CPKSs. In this paper, we propose the first lightweight hybrid signcryption scheme for SGC in heterogeneous CPKSs, named as the LHSC-SGC scheme. Security theorems are formally proven that the LHSC-SGC scheme possesses both unforgeability and confidentiality for data transmission. When compared to the existing lightweight signcryption schemes, the LHSC-SGC scheme has better performance and possesses heterogeneously compatible property. By performance simulation experiences, the LHSC-SGC scheme is well-suitable for SGC with IoT devices (i.e., smart meters).