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IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management

Q-Secure-P²-SMA: Quantum-Secure Privacy- Preserving Smart Meter Authentication for Unbreakable Security in Smart Grid

Kumar Prateek, Meghashrita Das, Sairaaj Surve, Soumyadev Maity, Ruhul Amin

Published Jan 25, 2024• 33 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Smart grids, steering an energy revolution through smart metering infrastructure, face cybersecurity threats and unauthorized access risks. Within these systems, classical authentication protocols validate identities, fostering trust and enabling access to authorized resources, while preventing unauthorized access. However, classical authentication protocols are predominantly dependent on public-key cryptography, rooted in computational hard problems such as integer factorization and discrete logs to uphold security. Nevertheless, these computational hard problems can be easily compromised by quantum adversaries. Furthermore, quantum-resistant smart meter authentication protocols are either deemed impractical or reliant on quantum hard problems, potentially lacking future-proof security. Moreover, maintaining SG entity privacy holds equal significance. Consequently, this article introduces the Quantum-Secure Privacy-Preserving Smart Meter Authentication (Q-Secure-P2-SMA) protocol. It utilizes semi-quantum key distribution and a hash function to facilitate quantum-resistant metering data communication, with a focus on privacy and practicality. The security analysis and performance evaluation conducted for Q-Secure-P2-SMA confirm its resilience against well-known security threats, showcasing improved efficiency compared to existing state-of-art-protocols across computation, communication, and energy overhead. Notably, the Q-Secure-P2-SMA doesn’t necessitate quantum capability among all SG entities, making it more practical and relevant in real-world scenarios.

DOI
10.1109/tnsm.2024.3357103

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Smart grids, steering an energy revolution through smart metering infrastructure, face cybersecurity threats and unauthorized access risks. Within these systems, classical authentication protocols validate identities, fostering trust and enabling access to authorized resources, while preventing unauthorized access. However, classical authentication protocols are predominantly dependent on public-key cryptography, rooted in computational hard problems such as integer factorization and discrete logs to uphold security. Nevertheless, these computational hard problems can be easily compromised by quantum adversaries. Furthermore, quantum-resistant smart meter authentication protocols are either deemed impractical or reliant on quantum hard problems, potentially lacking future-proof security. Moreover, maintaining SG entity privacy holds equal significance. Consequently, this article introduces the Quantum-Secure Privacy-Preserving Smart Meter Authentication (Q-Secure-P2-SMA) protocol. It utilizes semi-quantum key distribution and a hash function to facilitate quantum-resistant metering data communication, with a focus on privacy and practicality. The security analysis and performance evaluation conducted for Q-Secure-P2-SMA confirm its resilience against well-known security threats, showcasing improved efficiency compared to existing state-of-art-protocols across computation, communication, and energy overhead. Notably, the Q-Secure-P2-SMA doesn’t necessitate quantum capability among all SG entities, making it more practical and relevant in real-world scenarios.
The advancements of smart grid embedded Internet of things for monitor, control and collection of energy data from smart meter to data aggregator points. In this aspect two-way smart meter current challenges of data privacy and cyber-security concerns. To overcome these constraints numerous authenticated key agreements schemes considered to enhances performances and security. However, high latency and heavy cryptographic operation entails time and bits overheads. Moreover, quantum computing can break the classical encryption techniques and mathematical barriers of cyber defensive properties. Therefore, proposed quantum key distribution ensemble Paillier cryptosystem for maintains privacy-preserving and securing of smart metering infrastructures. The details security analysis showed proposed protocol can resistance various cyber-attacks with quantum computing threats. Furthermore, performances assessments based on extensive simulation of computation time and bits proposed protocols are leading position from existing schemes. Thus, the novel proposed key distribution enables efficiency, security, and data privacy which is emerging notions for the smart metering infrastructures.
Abstract Entity authentication and key exchange are fundamental prerequisites for ensuring the security of various emerging smart networks. However, most existing classical schemes are vulnerable to attacks from quantum computers. Recently, Prateek et al proposed a privacy-preserving mutual authentication scheme for smart metering infrastructure in smart grids. The authors claimed that their scheme is unconditionally secure and could resist various known security attacks, including impersonation attacks, eavesdropping attacks, and replay attacks. However, in this article, we demonstrate that there are serious security flaws in the proposed scheme. First, the scheme fails to ensure that two legitimate parties can reliably share a common session key, leading to a potential authentication failure. Second, an eavesdropper can exploit entangle-measure attacks to obtain partial information about the shared session key. Additionally, due to the inherent randomness of quantum measurements, the session key shared between two entities in each session is unpredictable. Consequently, the session keys distributed across different sessions may not be identical, further contributing to authentication failure. Finally, we provide an improvement to address these security flaws while preserving the original scheme’s advantageous features.
The Smart Grid (SG) represents the next-generation power system in the future grid infrastructure, designed for self-healing, adaptability, and sustainability. However, the interconnected and geographically dispersed nature of SG systems introduces cybersecurity risks, potentially leading to severe incidents. Cyber attacks on SG applications could result in significant events, including outages and infrastructure damage. These attacks may compromise energy data, starting with the leakage of personal information from grid members. To address these risks, confidentiality, device authentication, and data integrity are essential, traditionally implemented through public-key cryptography (PKC). The rise of quantum computers and the potential adaptation of algorithms like Shor’s poses a threat to PKC algorithms in SG communications. In response, we propose a security protocol for post-quantum communication in SG applications, ensuring resilience against classical and quantum attacks. The protocol has been tested through rigorous informal security analysis, and comparative analysis demonstrates its scalability and effectiveness in real-world scenarios.
Industry 4.0 allows faster data accessibility, improved performance, fault identification, and remote control of machines within any smart factory. Due to the massive generation of delay-sensitive data, this system demands a robust security mechanism against security threats. In order to mitigate such potential attacks and provide security-free services, this article proposes an edge-based conditional privacy-preserving authentication scheme based on quantum key distribution protocol for secure authentication and secure communication within smart grid infrastructure. Apart from guaranteeing security against threats such as node impersonation, message tampering, and repudiation, the scheme also defends man-in-the-middle attacks, replay attacks, etc. We validate the proposed protocol through a simulation study. The result indicates that it performs reasonably well and enables unconditional security for the data exchanged between entities of smart grid infrastructure.
The development and evolution of the smart grid into complex, cyber-physical energy systems make it essential to secure?communication among the distributed components. The rise of quantum computing has made it even more pressing to develop protocols that?are secure outside the limitations of classical cryptosystems. In this paper, it proposes a quantum-assisting secure communication scheme (QASCP) to?boost the security and energy for smart grid communication systems. The proposed protocol combines quantum key distribution with lightweight entropy-based mutual authentication and dynamic session management. It is designed to defend grid assets such as control centers, smart meters, and distribute energy?resources from sophisticated adversarial models, including quantum-capable threats. The approach consists of system level simulation utilizing a?co-simulation framework customized for quantum smart grid communication. The performance of this scheme was compared?against classical and PQ lattice-based schemes in terms of the authentication latency, energy consumption, entropy preservation, and scalability to handle the load and delay effects, under the assumptions of different loading and delay scenarios. Simulation results show that QASCP is able to reduce the energy consumption and authenticity latency, simultaneously it keeps the high throughput and leaves strong entropy?under attack scenarios. The protocol is also shown to?remain robust with varying quantum bit error rates as well as having a smaller memory footprint on popular network topologies. The results provide evidence for the practical integration of?quantum-secure communication in smart grid architectures. By addressing security and performance simultaneously, the protocol?provides a path to future-proof energy networks which can support dependable operations in a quantum-enhanced environment. This could be future enhance for energy efficiency.
Smart grids offer many advantages, but they also come with some risks, especially regarding network security and privacy. This study aims to investigate the privacy and security of existing smart grid systems and to give a cross-section of the latest findings in the field of secure data aggregation and authentication for smart grids. The study focuses on addressing the challenges posed by malicious tampering and unauthorized access to metering data by exploring innovative approaches to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of data through a process termed "secure aggregate" and that the result of secure aggregations is authenticated in a manner that is both scalable and effective using Quantum Key Distribution. A software prototype has been developed to facilitate machine-to-machine authentication because this cryptographic key can be used and machine connections can be verified. This can contribute to the protection of essential infrastructure, the creation of a continuous threat detection feedback system, and the foundations of this technology are essential conditions for increasing the ability of systems to authenticate users.