Safe is the New Smart: PUF-Based Authentication for Load Modification-Resistant Smart Meters

Abstract

In the energy sector, IoT manifests in the form of next-generation power grids that provide enhanced electrical stability, efficient power distribution, and utilization. The primary feature of a Smart Grid is the presence of an advanced bi-directional communication network between the Smart meters at the consumer end and the servers at the Utility Operators. Smart meters are broadly vulnerable to attacks on communication and physical systems. We propose a secure and operationally asymmetric mutual authentication and key-exchange protocol for secure communication. Our protocol balances security and efficiency, delegates complex cryptographic operations to the resource-equipped servers, and carefully manages the workload on the resource-constrained Smart meter nodes using unconventional lightweight primitives such as Physically Unclonable Functions. We prove the security of the protocol using well-established cryptographic assumptions. We implement the proposed scheme end-to-end in a Smart meter prototype using commercial-off-the-shelf products, a Utility server, and a credential generator as the trusted third party. Additionally, we demonstrate a physics-based attack named load modification attack on the Smart meter to demonstrate that merely securing the communication channel using authentication does not secure the meter, but requires further protections to ensure the correctness of the reported consumption. Hence, we propose a countermeasure to such an attack that goes side-by-side with our protocol implementation.

An efficient anonymous authentication and key agreement scheme with privacy-preserving for smart cities

“…But the scheme needs multiple interactions to ensure the security of authentication, resulting in huge computation and communication costs. Aiming at the low efficiency of authentication and resisting load modification attacks on the smart meter, Boyapally et al 25 proposed an authentication scheme based on physically unclonable functions(PUF). The scheme uses lightweight cryptographic primitives, which makes the scheme feasible in resource-constrained IoT devices.…”

T2T-MAP: A PUF-Based Thing-to-Thing Mutual Authentication Protocol for IoT

“…In [11], Boyapally et al, proposed a PUF-based authentication protocol for smart meters in the context of smart grid applications. The protocol allows a smart meter to be authenticated to a server using PUFs.…”

“…The protocol, as well as the firmware, are then uploaded and written into the flash memory of the board (i.e., flashing the board). TABLE 4 reports the size, in KB, of the sketch (code) of the protocol for each Arduino development board, node (Thing T 1 , Thing T 2 , and Gateway), and for different size of the variables, i.e., challenges, responses, nonces, and message integrity codes 11 . We have noticed that code of the gateway is larger than the code of Things (T 1 and T 2 ).…”

“…There has been a noticeable convergence from the research community to develop lightweight and secure-bydesign authentication protocols for IoT using PUFs (Physical Unclonable Functions) [11]- [25]. In fact, PUFs are physical one-way functions constructed from the unique nanoscopicstructure of physical objects (e.g., integrated circuits, crystals, magnets, lens, solar cells, or papers) and their reaction to random events.…”

“…Compared to the existing PUF-based authentication protocols [11]- [25], the proposed authentication protocol is secure against the attacks that were reported on those protocols as well as to known attacks [64]. Moreover, the proposed protocol adopts a new concept of extended challenge-response pairs (eCRPs) to obfuscate the classical structure of CRPs (cf.…”