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.
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.
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.
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.
The smart grid is a network of computers and power infrastructures that monitor and manage energy usage and uses intelligent transmission and distribution networks to deliver electricity for improving the electric system's reliability and efficiency. With grid controls, energy transmission management could be enhanced and resilience to control-system failures would be increased. Although deploying the smart grid has numerous social and technical benefits, several security concerns arise. In 2012, Xia and Wang proposed a secure key distribution for the smart grid. They claimed their protocol is strong enough to defend against security attacks. In this paper, we investigate the security of Xia and Wang's protocol. More precisely, we show that once the smart meter generates a session key with the service provider, the smart meter could easily forge the new legitimate session key without the service provider's participation. In order to remedy the security flaw, we propose a simple and secure improvement of Xia and Wang's protocol. Our protocol is secure and fair to generate the session key between the smart meter and the service provider.
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.
The key management faces significant challenges in terms of efficiency, scalability, and quantum resistance in smart grid environments. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing a novel mutual authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocol for the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era. The protocol integrates quantum and classical information streams, enabling secure key agreement without third-party reliance. For the first time, quantum-based mutual identity authentication is applied to smart grid security, with a comprehensive analysis of resilience against various attacks, including man-in-the-middle, quantum computation, relay, impersonation, and DoS. Experimental results show that the scheme achieves a communication cost of 0.9 KB for 2 rounds, outperforming quantum-resistant schemes (2.5 KB) and performing similarly to classical schemes (1.2 KB). The scheme requires 2 quantum preparations and 1 measurement, offering higher efficiency compared to quantum-resistant methods. Compared to QKD and computational hardness-based models, our approach provides superior key management efficiency, practical implementation in non-fault-tolerant quantum systems, and enhanced security protection. Rigorous analysis and validation using IBM’s quantum-enabled environments demonstrate the robustness of the protocol in addressing modern smart grid security challenges.