Extremely Lightweight PUF-based Batch Authentication Protocol for End-Edge-Cloud Hierarchical Smart Grid

Abstract

Smart grid is gradually replacing traditional grid with two-way communication and improved management. Besides the efficiency and reliability it brings, the smart grid is inevitably fraught with rampant physical and cyber-attack. Although several physical unclonable function (PUF)-based schemes have been proposed, they are unsuited to the end-edge-cloud hierarchical smart grid. This paper proposes a PUF-based batch authentication and key agreement protocol, which protects both meters and gateways and provides end-to-end authentication between meters and the server. By offloading heavy operations from field devices to the server, the computation overhead is reduced substantially. Moreover, we innovatively devolve batch authentication and access control to the gateway, which additionally decreases downlink communication and signaling cost, and is superior to most recent schemes. Our protocol is proved by Tamarin under extended Dolev–Yao adversary and the Real-or-Random model and is evaluated to be secure against various attacks. Using extremely lightweight operations, our protocol is implemented on the MSP430FR5969 microcontroller.