A Lightweight Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for IoT-Enabled Smart Grid System

Abstract

The IoT-enabled Smart Grid uses IoT smart devices to collect the private electricity data of consumers and send it to service providers over the public network, which leads to some new security problems. To ensure the communication security in a smart grid, many researches are focusing on using authentication and key agreement protocols to protect against cyber attacks. Unfortunately, most of them are vulnerable to various attacks. In this paper, we analyze the security of an existent protocol by introducing an insider attacker, and show that their scheme cannot guarantee the claimed security requirements under their adversary model. Then, we present an improved lightweight authentication and key agreement protocol, which aims to enhance the security of IoT-enabled smart grid systems. Furthermore, we proved the security of the scheme under the real-or-random oracle model. The result shown that the improved scheme is secure in the presence of both internal attackers and external attackers. Compared with the original protocol, the new protocol is more secure, while keeping the same computation efficiency. Both of them are 0.0552 ms. The communication of the new protocol is 236 bytes, which is acceptable in smart grids. In other words, with similar communication and computation cost, we proposed a more secure protocol for smart grids.

A Provably Secure Anonymous Authentication Protocol for Consumer and Service Provider Information Transmissions in Smart Grids

“…Although identity protection is assured, this technique incurs high computation costs [6]. To offer efficiency in smart grids, lightweight authentication schemes are developed in [1,6,29,[31][32][33][34]. However, the schemes in [6,31,32] have not been evaluated against de-synchronization attacks.…”

“…Similarly, the protocol in [29] has not been evaluated against spoofing and guessing attacks. Although the schemes in [1,33] are resilient against de-synchronization attacks, they have not been evaluated against spoofing attacks. On the other hand, the scheme in [34] cannot withstand desynchronization attacks [29].…”

“…This can be explained by the computationally extensive bilinear pairings in [22]. This is followed by the protocols in [6], [31], [32], [1], [13], [47], [10], [29], and [33] respectively. Conversely, our protocol incurs the least computation complexities.…”

“…Table 6 presents the comparative analysis of the incurred communication complexities of our protocol together with those of its peer approaches. Even though the approach in [33] has a relatively lower execution time, it cannot withstand guessing, KSSTI, eavesdropping, ephemeral secret leakage, spoofing, and physical capture attacks. In the SG environment, the majority of components does not have a high computation power; hence, our protocol is the most suitable for deployment.…”

“…Auth Using the values in [23,33,39], the hashing, symmetric encryption, point multiplication, timestamps, and symmetric decryption output lengths are 160 bits, 128 bits, 320 bits, 32 bits, and 128 bits, correspondingly. As such, Auth-1 = 160 + 160 + 160 + 160 = 640 bits; Auth-2 = {160 + 160 + 160 + 160} = 640 bits; Auth-3 = {160 + 160} = 320 bits; and Auth-4 = {160 + 160} = 320 bits.…”