Distributed Attribute-Based Signature With Attribute Dynamic Update for Smart Grid

Smart grid is gaining more and more attention as one of the typical applications of Internet of Things. However, in a distributed environment, how to guarantee the privacy of users in electricity trading while ensuring the efficiency of the transactions is one of the urgent issues to be solved. In this article, we propose a distributed attribute-based signature (DABS) scheme for distributed electricity trading, which can support users' free choice of trade objects without revealing their real identities. We construct a signature generation and verification method by taking advantage of the open and hard-to-tamper properties of blockchain to achieve signature verifiability independent of dynamic changes in attributes.To improve the update efficiency, we propose an improved scheme that enables the update complexity to be reduced from $O(n)$ to $O(\log n)$, where $n$ is the number of users. Finally, performance analysis and simulation experiments demonstrate the security and practicality of the DABS.

I. Introduction

With the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) technology and the popularity of IoT devices [1], [2], an era of the interconnection of everything has arrived. A prominent example of the IoT is the smart grid [3], which can be seen as the next generation of the electricity grid [4]. Smart grids consist of multiple smart components that sense measurements and send this data over the network, thus enabling real-time feedback on energy consumption. The widespread use of smart grid technologies is due to the popularity of the use of heterogeneous energy sources such as renewable and nonrenewable resources and the need for simultaneous energy production and consumption. Smart grid has new features such as dynamic and transparent electricity prices, free electricity trading between energy producers and energy consumers [5], etc. Specifically, households, communities, or factories cannot only meet their own electricity needs by generating electricity by themselves, but also make profits by selling excess electricity to nearby users at a suitable price through the smart grid [6], [7].