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.
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.
With the enablement of Internet of Things technology, the electrical grid is currently undergoing a drastic revolution, which is known as smart grid. Since massive sensitive data and control commands transmitted via public channels, the smart grid is challenged by various cyber threats. Authenticated key agreement protocols in smart grid effectively ensure the confidentiality and authentication of communication through mutual authentication and establishing session keys. In this article, we review the existing elliptic curve cryptography (ECC)-based authentication and key agreement protocols in smart gird and perform a security analysis of Hu et al.’s protocol. We exhibit that the protocol fails to resist key compromise impersonation (KCI) attack and cannot provide untraceability. Furthermore, we propose a security-enhanced authentication and key agreement protocol based on ECC, which performs registration, authentication, and key agreement phases over public channels to enable mutual authentication and to establish session keys. The protocol is also proved to be security-enhanced by formal proof and informal analysis. The performance analysis results demonstrate that the proposed protocol is comparable to other existing protocols while achieving enhanced security. Therefore, the protocol satisfies the deployment requirements for resource-constrained smart grid.
In the Internet of Things (IoT) environment, more types of devices than ever before are connected to the internet to provide IoT services. Smart devices are becoming more intelligent and improving performance, but there are devices with little computing power and low storage capacity. Devices with limited resources will have difficulty applying existing public key cryptography systems to provide security. Therefore, communication protocols for various kinds of participating devices should be applicable in the IoT environment, and these protocols should be lightened for resources-restricted devices. Security is an essential element in the IoT environment, so for secure communication, it is necessary to perform authentication between the communication objects and to generate the session key. In this paper, we propose two kinds of lightweight authentication and key agreement schemes to enable fast and secure authentication among the objects participating in the IoT environment. The first scheme is an authentication and key agreement scheme with limited resource devices that can use the elliptic curve Qu-Vanstone (ECQV) implicit certificate to quickly agree on the session key. The second scheme is also an authentication and key agreement scheme that can be used more securely, but slower than first scheme using certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC). In addition, we compare and analyze existing schemes and propose new schemes to improve security requirements that were not satisfactory.
Abstract Smart grid (SG) facilitates our lives by providing more reliable electricity and enabling better integration of renewable energy sources. Currently, numerous authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocols have been proposed to secure SG communication. However, these solutions often result in considerable cost, making them inappropriate for resource-constrained SG environment. In this paper, we propose a secure and resource-efficient AKA protocol by employing lightweight cryptography primitives including authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD) primitive ASCON, hash function and XOR operation. The ASCON primitive simultaneously provides data confidentiality, integrity and authenticity with low computation cost, making it suitable for employing in resource-constrained SG environment. The secret intermediate values in the protocol are designed as hash values that incorporate both long-term and short-term secrets, thereby providing enhanced security while further reducing cost. Moreover, a dynamic indexing method is deployed in the protocol to resist de-synchronization attack. The designed protocol performs secure mutual authentication and session key establishment between entities without relying on a central trusted authority. The proposed protocol is proven secure through rigorous security proof under the real-or-random model and formally verified by AVISPA tool. Theoretical performance analysis and simulation results indicate that the proposed protocol outperforms other related protocols due to its lightweight nature and adherence to all fundamental security attributes, making it suitable for deployment in smart grid environment.
Unlike traditional power networks, the smart grid power system has the ability to arrange the power supply in real time to the customer for active power consumption. Therefore, it can avoid excess electricity generation. In addition, based on the current power consumption, the power service providers can measure the expected power generation amount to stabilize the power system. Compared with traditional power networks, the characteristics of the smart grid power system make it easier to suffer from several types of security threats and attacks such as impersonation, eavesdropping and message modification etc. In order to strength the security of smart grid networks, a robust and efficient authentication protocol should provide to mutual authentication and session key agreement. Since the communications between the control center and the substation is protected by the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system, we focus on the secure communication between the substation and the smart appliances. In this paper, a robust and efficient authentication protocol based on elliptic curve cryptography is proposed to achieve mutual authentication and key agreement between the substation and the smart appliances. In addition, the proposed protocol not only resists replay attacks, impersonation attacks, and man-in-middle attacks, but also provides the session key security and the known-key security.
As smart home devices become more widely available, their limited resources and potential exposure to various types of cyber-attacks make it difficult for the traditional security protocols to remain effective. Cloud-enabled smart home IoT platforms have helped to improve device intelligence and overall efficiency when controlling them, but the additional use of cloud computing has also created additional complexity in controlling these devices through user-defined automated rules and remote access via vendor apps. Conventional security schemes do not consider these types of control models, nor do they provide a reasonable balance of the additional computational overhead introduced, the efficiency of communications, and the level of security provided. Additionally, with the introduction of quantum computing, current public key cryptography primitives will become obsolete, necessitating the requirement for an adoption of post-quantum security measures. To overcome these issues, this paper presents a proposal for a lightweight mutual authentication and key agreement scheme that employs post-quantum cryptography primitives to facilitate a secure interaction between the user’s cloud platforms, smart home devices, and the user. The protocol also supports remote secure control, while providing the resistance to both classical and quantum attacks. The proposed protocol has been thoroughly evaluated through formal verification using the ProVerif tool and multiple heuristic evaluation techniques. Additionally, the security features of the proposed protocol have been compared to those of several existing methods, providing evidence that it offers improved security features, forward secrecy, and quantum resistance while maintaining a lightweight profile compatible with the limitations of modern smart homes.
Smart grids leverage smart terminal devices to collect information from the user side, achieving accurate load forecasting and optimized dispatching of power systems, effectively improving power supply efficiency and reliability while reducing energy consumption. However, the development of quantum technology poses severe challenges to the communication security of smart grids that rely on traditional cryptography. To address this security risk in the quantum era, this paper draws on the core idea of quantum private comparison and proposes a quantum-secure identity authentication and key agreement scheme suitable for smart grids. This scheme uses Bell states as quantum resources, combines hash functions and XOR operations, and can adapt to resource-constrained terminal devices. Through a security proof, it verifies the scheme's ability to resist various attacks; the experimental results further show that the scheme still has good robustness in different noise environments, providing a feasible technical path for the secure communication of smart grids in the quantum environment and having clear practical engineering value.