Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Smart Grid Downlink Communication Using Identity Based Signcryption

In this paper, we propose an efficient, secure and privacy-preserving scheme for smart grid downlink communication. Specifically, we propose an efficient identity based signcryption scheme, called EIBSC, providing privacy preservation in downlink communication for smart grids. The proposed scheme is characterized by employing the concealing destination technique on a tree network topology to protect consumer privacy in downlink communication. Moreover, the proposed scheme employs identity based signcryption to efficiently achieve downlink message source authentication, data integrity and encryption. Additionally, compared to other identity-based signcryption schemes, the proposed scheme is more efficient in regards to computational overhead and ciphertext size. Furthermore, our security analysis illustrates that the proposed scheme is resilient against various security threats to smart grids.