ECDRS: Efficient certificateless deniable ring signature with privacy preserving based on SM2 in smart grids
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2026
Department/School
Information Security and Applied Computing
Publication Title
Computer Networks
Abstract
The smart grid leverages real-time data sharing to connect diverse stakeholders for efficient operations and precise service delivery. The transmitted data in smart grid is highly sensitive and vulnerable to eavesdropping and tampering. Deniable ring signature technology is a promising cryptographic primitive that addresses the aforementioned concerns by providing both anonymity and traceability. However, existing approaches present a fundamental trade-off in which the schemes based on the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) are constrained by the prohibitively high overhead associated with certificate management. Identity-Based Cryptography (IBC) schemes eliminate certificates but are inherently susceptible to key escrow and require a centralized trust model. To address these issues, we propose ECDRS, an efficient certificateless deniable ring signature scheme with privacy preserving based on SM2 elliptic curve public key cryptography algorithm, designed to circumvent the certificate management overhead and mitigate the key escrow problem for secure communications in smart grids. Additionally, a batch verification algorithm is designed compatible with linear homomorphic additive aggregation, enabling efficient verification of multiple signatures. The security of ECDRS is formally proved under the random oracle model, including unforgeability, anonymity, traceability, and non-frameability. Performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed ECDRS achieves high efficiency in terms of computation and communication. For instance, when the number of ring members is set to n=250, the total execution time for signature generation and verification is reduced by 50% to 97.01% compared to existing schemes. Furthermore, when the ring size n=40 and the number of signatures η=200, the execution time for batch signature verification is reduced by 49.82% to 74.91%.
Link to Published Version
Recommended Citation
Liu, D., Wang, H., Yu, G., Tan, H., & Guan, Y. (2026). ECDRS: Efficient certificateless deniable ring signature with privacy preserving based on SM2 in smart grids. Computer Networks, 279, 112136. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2026.112136
Comments
Y. Guan is a faculty member in EMU's School of Information Security and Applied Computing.