A Blockchain-Based Certificateless Aggregate Signature Scheme for Fog-Enabled Smart Grid Environment

The smart grid-based power grid systems face many challenges like- higher computational power requirements, higher latency, security and privacy issues, and single point of failure. In the power grid systems, multiple distribution centers are responsible for supplying electricity in an area. Thus, to address the issues such as single point of failure and higher latency, this paper integrates fog computing and blockchain into the smart grid utilizing distribution centers as blockchain peers and proposes a distributed smart grid environment. Moreover, to address the security and privacy issues, the existing signature schemes face issues like- certificate management, key escrow, higher computational cost, etc. Therefore, this paper employs a certificateless approach and proposes a blockchain-based certificateless aggregate signature scheme that provides authentication, integrity, and privacy in the proposed smart grid environment. Next, a thorough security analysis has been done to prove the security strength of proposed scheme against different types of attackers and attacks. Finally, the performance analysis based on Hyperledger Fabric and cryptography libraries proves the computational and communication efficiency of the proposed scheme.