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

Signcryption integrates both signature and encryption schemes into single scheme to ensure both content unforgeability (authentication) and message confidentiality while reducing computational complexity. Typically, both signers (senders) and decrypters (receivers) in a signcryption scheme belong to the same public-key systems. When signers and decrypters in a signcryption scheme belong to heterogeneous public-key systems, this scheme is called a hybrid signcryption scheme which provides more elastic usage than typical signcryption schemes. In recent years, a new kind of attack, named side-channel attack, allows adversaries to learn a portion of the secret keys used in cryptographic algorithms. To resist such an attack, leakage-resilient cryptography has been widely discussed and studied while a large number of leakage-resilient schemes have been proposed. Also, numerous hybrid signcryption schemes under heterogeneous public-key systems were proposed, but none of them possesses leakage-resilient property. In this paper, we propose the first hybrid signcryption scheme with leakage resilience, called leakage-resilient hybrid signcryption scheme, in heterogeneous public-key systems (LR-HSC-HPKS). Security proofs are demonstrated to show that the proposed scheme provides both authentication and confidentiality against two types of adversaries in heterogeneous public-key systems.

Ensuring the security of transmitted content is an important task in network communication. Signcryption technology combines signature and encryption operations in a single step to achieve message authentication and confidentiality. In practical applications, users are usually in different cryptographic systems, the ordinary signcryption technology cannot realize communication between two different cryptographic systems. And the ciphertext structure of the existing signcryption schemes is relatively complex, signcryption is not efficient. Therefore, in order to solve the problem of efficient communication between different cryptosystems and ensure quantum security, this paper proposes a lattice-based efficient heterogeneous signcryption scheme for secure network communications. This signcryption scheme accomplishes signcryption through matrix operations and hash functions, which avoids complex signcryption structures, efficiently realizes bidirectional message communication between identity-based cryptosystems and certificateless cryptosystems.

Designing communication strategies for heterogeneous parallel systems

This paper investigates architectural and communication issues in designing heterogeneous parallel systems. The emerging high speed passive star-coupled optical interconnection using wavelength division multiplexing is considered as the system interconnect to provide high bandwidth communication demanded by heterogeneous systems. A representative master-slave computational model together with two different task scheduling strategies are used to evaluate and determine suitable communication strategy for such systems. It is shown that a hierarchical ALOHA-based communication strategy between the master and the slaves, implemented on top of the passive star-coupled network, leads to a considerable reduction in contention and task completion time compared to the direct communication from the slaves to the master. The time division multiplexed access (TDMA) approach has performance comparable to the hierarchical strategy. Depending on the application characteristics, the number of levels in the hierarchal scheme can be chosen to provide a balance between channel contention and overall execution time. These results provide guidelines for designing scalable heterogeneous systems in near future. >

To make authenticated encryption which provides confidentiality and authenticity of a message simultaneously, a signcryption scheme uses asymmetric primitives, such as an asymmetric encryption scheme for confidentiality and a signature scheme for authentication. Among the signcryption schemes, the hybrid signcryption schemes are the signcryption schemes that use a key agreement scheme to exchange a symmetric encryption key, and then encrypt a plaintext using a symmetric encryption scheme. The hybrid signcryption schemes are specially efficient for signcrypting a bulk data because of its use of a symmetric encryption. Hence to achieve the joint goals of confidentiality and authenticity in most practical implementation, hybrid signcryption schemes are commonly used. In the paper, we study the properties of signcryption and propose a new generic hybrid signcryption scheme called DHEtS using encrypt-thensign composition method. DHEtS uses a symmetric encryption scheme, a signature scheme, and the DH key agreement scheme. We analyze DHEtS with respect to the properties of signcryption, and show that DHEtS provides non-repudiation and public verifiability. DHEtS is the first provable secure signcryption schemes with public verifiability. If encrypting and signing components of DHEtS can use the same random coins, the computational cost and the size of a signcryption would be greatly reduced.We show the conditions of signing component to achieve randomness-efficiency.

Lhsc-Sgc: A Lightweight Hybrid Signcryption Scheme for Smart Grid Communications In Heterogeneous Cryptographic Public-Key Systems

Confidentiality and authenticity are two important security requirements in most secure systems. To efficiently provide data privacy (confidentiality) and (data/user) authenticity simultaneously, the notion of signcryption scheme was first introduced by Zheng in 1997. The security model for signcryption scheme was proposed by Baek et al. and An et al. in 2002 independently. Since then, many signcryption schemes were proposed; they are either a public-key signcryption or a hybrid signcryption. But, only few proposed signcryption schemes were supposed to be in the insider security, for example, Libert-Quisquater's signcryption schemes at PKC'2004 and SCN'2004 respectively and Yang-Wong-Deng's signcryption scheme at ISC'2005. Although all the above mentioned signcryption schemes were proved insider-secure against adaptive chosen ciphertext attack in the random oracle models, Tan showed that all the above mentioned signcryption schemes were not insider-secure against adaptive chosen ciphertext attack in 2005 and 2006 respectively. Up to our knowledge, it seems that none of insider-secure hybrid signcryption scheme is constructed without random oracles. In this paper, we proposed a hybrid signcryption scheme and showed that the proposed scheme is insider-secure without random oracles

To achieve secure communication in heterogeneous cryptography systems, we present a heterogeneous hybrid signcryption scheme. The proposed scheme allows a sender in an identity-based cryptography system to send multi-message to multi-receiver in a certificateless cryptography system with different master keys. At the same time, all users are mapped to a distinct pseudo-identity for conditional identity privacy preservation. A trusted authority could trace the real identity when necessary. Compared with existing schemes, the proposed scheme is more practical for actual applications. In addition, the proposed scheme has indistinguishability against adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks and existential unforgeability against adaptive chosen message attacks under the random oracle model.

The traditional power gird is altering dramatically to a smart power grid with the escalating development of information and communication technology (ICT). Among thousands of electronic devices connected to the grid through communication network, smart meter (SM) is the core networking device. The consolidation of ICT to the electronic devices centered on SM open loophole for the adversaries to launch cyber-attack. Therefore, for protecting the network from the adversaries it is required to design lightweight security mechanism for SM, as conventional cryptography schemes poses extensive computational cost, processing delay and overhead which is not suitable to be used in SM. In this paper, we have proposed a security mechanism consolidating elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and Salsa20 stream cipher algorithm to ensure security of the network as well as addressing the problem of energy efficiency and lightweight security solution. We have numerically analyzed the performance of our proposed scheme in case of energy efficiency and processing time which reveals that the suggested mechanism is suitable to be used in SM as it consumes less power and requires less processing time to encrypt or decrypt.

The smart metering infrastructure plays an important role in smart grid environments. Such metering networks need to be protected against cyber attacks by using authenticated key exchange protocols, and many relevant schemes have been presented by researchers. In addition, in order to protect against the energy theft problem, it is also important to consider physical security of the smart meter. Recently, PUFs (physical uncloneable functions) have gained popularity as a primitive against physical attacks. In 2019, we proposed the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">first</i> PUF-based authentication scheme for secure smart grid communication with resilience against physical attacks on smart meters. However, recent studies have shown that PUFs are susceptible to modeling attacks. To address this issue, this paper proposes a reconfigurable authenticated key exchange scheme for secure communication in smart grids by using the concept of reconfigurable PUFs. In addition to security, the efficiency evaluation demonstrates that our new scheme has advantages in both the computation and communication costs as compared to the state-of-the-art protocols.

The goal of this paper is to present a robust survivability strategy for the communication network in smart grids when communication failure happens because (1) communication failure is inevitable, (2) communication failure can impact smart grid performance. A communication failure can be temporary or permanent. A temporary failure is often caused by electromagnetic interference, storms, obstructions, and other temporary factors while a permanent failure is usually due to terminal or transmitter breakdown. A communication failure causes temporary or permanent unavailability of the communication link. Thus, the message broadcasted from the sending device may never reach the intended receiving device. A simple but realistic strategy will be proposed to model communication failure in a smart grid simulation test bed. Then, a solution to overcome the communication failure will be presented. The strategy will be tested on the modified IEEE 34 node test feeder.

ABSTRACTBy offering indisputable advantages over traditional grid including remote readings and load balancing, smart grid is regarded as the modernization of the electricity delivery system. In this paper, we propose a privacy‐preserving and secure multi‐dimensional aggregation scheme for smart grid communications in digital communities. By integrating privacy homomorphism encryption with aggregation signature scheme, data authentication and integrity protection are performed and proved without disclosing any fine‐grained user consumption data. The construction of member list allows the fault tolerance of our scheme against accidental errors. In addition, the batch verification technique is adopted to reduce the computation cost of the operation center, and each user's computation cost is independent of the number of collected data types. Security analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate that the proposed scheme can resist various security threats and preserve identity privacy and has significantly less communication overhead and computation cost than other existing approaches. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.

Wireless body area networks (WBAN) enable ubiquitous monitoring of patients, which can change the future of healthcare services overwhelmingly. As the collected data of patients usually contain sensitive information, how to collect, transfer, store and share data securely and properly has become a concerning issue. Attribute-based encryption (ABE) can achieve data confidentiality and fine-grained access control simultaneously. Identity-based ring signature (IBRS) allows patients to prove their identity without leaking any extra (private) information. However, the heavy computational burden of ABE and IBRS is intolerable for most power-limited mobile devices, which account for a large proportion of WBAN devices. This paper combines the attribute-based online/offline encryption (ABOOE) and IBRS to achieve an outsourced online/offline hybrid signcryption ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O^{3}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> HSC) scheme. As far as we know, this scheme is the first signcryption scheme that adopts IBRS and satisfies online/offline signcryption simultaneously. <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O^{3}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> HSC divides the key generation and signcryption into offline and online phases to increase the throughput of the central authority and save the power resources of mobile devices, respectively. Besides, outsourced decryption and public signature verification are also realized. <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O^{3}\mathrm {HSC}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> achieves security under CCA and CMIA, and the performance analysis shows that <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O^{3}\mathrm {HSC}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is a lightweight and applicable scheme for WBAN.

The future smart grid is envisioned as a large scale cyberphysical system encompassing advanced power, communications, control, and computing technologies. To accommodate these technologies, it will have to build on solid mathematical tools that can ensure an efficient and robust operation of such heterogeneous and large-scale cyberphysical systems. In this context, this article is an overview on the potential of applying game theory for addressing relevant and timely open problems in three emerging areas that pertain to the smart grid: microgrid systems, demand-side management, and communications. In each area, the state-of-the-art contributions are gathered and a systematic treatment, using game theory, of some of the most relevant problems for future power systems is provided. Future opportunities for adopting game-theoretic methodologies in the transition from legacy systems toward smart and intelligent grids are also discussed. In a nutshell, this article provides a comprehensive account of the application of game theory in smart grid systems tailored to the interdisciplinary characteristics of these systems that integrate components from power systems, networking, communications, and control.

In the era of big data, many new algorithms are developed to try and find the most efficient way to perform computations with massive amounts of data. However, what is often overlooked is the preprocessing step for many of these applications. The Data Integration Benchmark Suite (DIBS) [1] was designed to understand the characteristics of dataset transformations in a hardware agnostic way. While on the surface these applications have a high amount of data parallelism, there are caveats in their specification that can potentially affect this characteristic. Even still, OpenCL can be an effective deployment environment for these applications.In this work we take a subset of the data transformations from each category presented in DIBS and implement them in OpenCL to evaluate their performance for heterogeneous systems. For targeting heterogeneous systems, we take a common application and attempt to deploy it to three platforms targetable by OpenCL (CPU, GPU, and FPGA). The applications are evaluated by their average transformation data rate (see Figure 1). We illustrate the advantages of each compute device in the data integration space along with different communications schemes allowed for host/device communication in the OpenCL platform.