ECC-Based Certificateless Aggregate Signcryption Scheme in Cyber-Physical Power Systems

The signcryption schemes play an important role in keeping the security of information interactions among the devices in cyber-physical power systems (CPPSs). However, the existing schemes based on bilinear pairing have heavy computation and communication costs, making it challenging to deploy to resource-constrained devices (RCDs). Moreover, the most existing aggregate signcryption schemes do not validate the signcryption ciphertext when the data are aggregated by the aggregation device, jeopardizing the security and stability of the CPPSs. To solve these issues, this article explores a novel certificateless aggregate signcryption scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography applied to information interaction among RCDs of CPPSs. First, a lightweight signcryption scheme is proposed to achieve secure information interaction of RCDs. Then, to efficiently discover illegal signcryption in the aggregate signcryption, a method of constructing a 2-D matrix is proposed, which improves the robustness of secure information interaction. Furthermore, the security of the proposed signcryption scheme is theoretically proven by the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem and computational Diffie–Hellman problem assumptions, and the scheme is theoretically analyzed to meet the security requirements of RCDs. Finally, experiments are carried out to validate the efficacy and appropriateness of the proposed signcryption scheme.