Abstract
The smart grid is considered to be the next-generation power system because of its reliability, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. In recent years, the smart grid technology has attracted a lot of attention from both academia and industry. Advances in smart grid technologies are enabling more data to be collected and analyzed in real-time for many kinds of smart grid applications. As the amount of data increases, the traditional smart grid data management system cannot provide sufficient storage and processing capacities. To address these challenges, cloud computing is being introduced into the power system and the cloud-based smart grid data management system has been proposed to better support smart grid applications. In this cloud-based system, the data are stored and analyzed by the remote cloud server according to the requirements of smart grid applications. However, the loss of physical control over the smart grid data makes it a significant challenge in ensuring the integrity of the data. Many provable data possession schemes have been proposed in the past few years. However, most of them suffer from serious security weaknesses or poor performance. We propose an efficient certificateless provable data possession (CL-PDP) scheme for cloud-based smart grid applications. Security analysis shows that the proposed scheme is provably secure in a robust security model and can satisfy several security requirements. Performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme results in lower computation costs as compared to two recently proposed CL-PDP schemes.