PUF‐based solutions for secure communications in Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI)

Abstract

Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) provides 2‐way communications between the utility and the smart meters. Developing authenticated key exchange (AKE) and broadcast authentication (BA) protocols is essential to provide secure communications in AMI. The security of all existing cryptographic protocols is based on the assumption that secret information is stored in the nonvolatile memories. In the AMI, the attackers can obtain some or all of the stored secret information from memories by a great variety of inexpensive and fast side‐channel attacks. Thus, all existing AKE and BA protocols are no longer secure. In this paper, we investigate how to develop secure AKE and BA protocols in the presence of memory attacks. As a solution, we propose to embed a physical unclonable function (PUF) in each party, which generates the secret values as required without the need to store them. By combining PUFs and 2 well‐known and secure protocols, we propose PUF‐based AKE and BA protocols. We show that our proposed protocols are memory leakage resilient. In addition, we prove their security in the standard model. Performance analysis of both protocols shows their efficiency for AMI applications. The proposed protocols can be easily implemented.

Key Management Systems for Smart Grid Advanced Metering Infrastructure: A Survey

“…Also, to reduce storage and communication costs in key management, a multi-group key graph structure is proposed in this work. The proposed key graph technique allows multiple DR projects to share a Benmalek et al [49] Benmalek et al [51] Example: Liu et al [48] Yu et al [52] Example: Parvez et al [54] Example: Nicanfar et al [55] Example: Wan et al [32] Example: Nabeel et al [57] Example: Khasawneh et al [4] Hash Chain Example: Delavar et al [58] new set of keys. When a user joins or leaves a DR project, the communication cost for rekeying operations does not increase significantly compared to the cost induced by using separate LKH tree inside each DR project.…”

An Ultra-Lightweight and Provably Secure Broadcast Authentication Protocol for Smart Grid Communications

“…In 2017, Delavar et al [32] proposed a broadcast authentication scheme based on Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) named PUF-BA. They proposed their scheme with assumption that s are computationally resources constraints and the expense of communication grows as the number of connected s increases.…”

“…In addition, they assumed that s are located in an unprotected environment which can be physically threatened by adversaries. Although their scheme was proposed for networks with resources constrained devices, yet it required high computational power from s. To overcome the high computational overhead of [32], quite recently in 2019, Ameri et al [33] proposed a provably secure broadcast authentication scheme for smart grid based on PUF. They used the advantage of Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) coding algorithm for error correcting to make the PUF responses reliable.…”

“…They used the advantage of Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) coding algorithm for error correcting to make the PUF responses reliable. Although they proved that their protocol provides a high level of security and reduces the computational cost dramatically compared to [32], the computational cost and storage burden were still significant based on s' capabilities.…”

“…Needless to say, because of non-existence of idealized PUF, helper data is used to help the smart meters to be able to recover the same PUF responses. Moreover, the proposed scheme in [32] used three parameters computed as = , = , = + which we considered to have 2048-bit, 2048-bit, and 768-bit length, respectively. In addition, in proposed scheme in [31], the authors considered that the private key is consisted of parameters where each of them has bit length.…”