More efficient key establishment protocol for smart grid communications: Design and experimental evaluation on ARM-based hardware

Blockchain-based anonymous authentication and data aggregation for advanced metering infrastructure in smart grid

Smart grid (SG) achieves more convenient and efficient power transmission through the rapid development of the information and communication technology. In addition to the transmission of electrical energy, the SG system also involves privacy and control information of service providers, which is closely related to people's livelihood. However, at present, the data in the SG system are transmitted in the form of plaintext, which does not have complete protection measures for entity privacy and communication data security. Focusing on preserving entity privacy and data security, this article proposes an anonymous secure authentication protocol (ASAP-SG) for the SG environment. Based on elliptic curve cryptography and physical unclonable function, ASAP-SG can realize authentication and key agreement between smart meters and service providers. The security of ASAP-SG has been verified with proverif tool and proven strictly under the real-or-random model. Furthermore, heuristic analysis manifests that ASAP-SG can successfully resist known security attacks. Finally, a fully comparison with the other five most advanced schemes reveals that ASAP-SG consumes the optimal computation cost on both smart meters and service providers and reduces the communication overhead by 33.3%–45.8%, on the basis of satisfying ten security objectives. These features make ASAP-SG more suitable for resource-constrained SG environment.

SummaryIn smart grid, bidirectional communications between the smart meters and control center are subject to several security challenges. Since the smart meters have limited storage space and processing capability, the suggested communication scheme not only must consider the security requirements but also should put the least possible burden on the smart meters' resources. In 2014, an interesting communication scheme has been proposed for the secure consumption reports transmission of the smart meters to the neighbor gateways. In this paper, we first show that this scheme is vulnerable to the smart meter's memory modification, pollution, and denial of service attacks; then, we propose an authenticated communication scheme, which not only is secure against the aforementioned attacks, but also is much more efficient in terms of storage space, communication overhead, and computational complexity. Moreover, our scheme also presents the details of control messages transmission from the neighborhood gateways to the smart meters. Our comparative analysis with several recently published schemes indicates that the proposed scheme is more suitable than the previous ones. More significantly, our realistic implementation on ATmega2560, as a suitable candidate to be used for the smart meters, confirms our claim.

In smart grid, key exchange protocols play a vital role in providing secure channels to read consumption reports from the smart meters. Thus far, several key exchange schemes have been proposed for the networked smart meters. However, for the first time, quite recently, Sha et al . have presented an interesting two-phase authentication and key agreement scheme that exclusively aims at the isolated smart meters. In their scheme, they have properly addressed the computationally constrained smart meters by offering a lightweight key exchange protocol. Nevertheless, after meticulous observation, we found that their proposed scheme cannot resist the desynchronization attack and cannot provide the perfect forward secrecy. Moreover, there are some other weaknesses in their scheme. As a result, to tackle the existing security challenges, in this paper, by utilization of the extended Chebyshev chaotic maps, we propose an efficient anonymous password-authenticated key exchange protocol that not only is free from the limitations of Sha et al .'s scheme, but also provides the anonymity. The security analysis in the random oracle model and using the widely accepted ProVerif tool besides the computational and communication costs comparison demonstrate that the proposed scheme has reached a proper level of efficiency without sacrificing the desired security properties.

Mobile terminals have been widely used in the communication applications (e.g., vehicular network, e-Health, smart grid and e-Commerce) as they can obtain all kinds of services and upload data for users anytime and anywhere. With the number of users increasing dramatically and user demands diversifying, multi-server architecture was proposed to solve issues on lack of service resources that single-server architecture remains. However, multi-server architecture faces a series of challenges in applications, such as security and authentication efficiency requirements. Thus, many authenticated key agreement (AKA) protocols are presented, yet most of them require unacceptable computation and communication overhead, which is inefficient indeed. In this paper, we propose an adaptive secure handover authenticated key agreement protocol for multi-server architecture. Specifically, broadcast mechanism is utilized to assist users to select appropriate service providers with the lowest cost. Users can realize efficient handover authentication with multiple servers in the proposed scheme, that is, after completing initial authentication, users can switch to other servers and complete authentication through simple operations. Security analysis shows the proposed protocol can meet all security requirements and compared with other relevant protocols, it greatly reduces the computation and communication overhead. In addition, the above advantages grow significantly as the number of servers to be authenticated increases.

Reducing the power supply-demand gap and increasing reliability of power supply are the challenges of current energy management. Implementation of smart grid, smart meters and smart metering can be a possible solution for power demand reduction, efficient power supply management, and optimization of management resource usages. Smart meters include sophisticated measurement and calculation hardware, software, calibration and communication capabilities. For interoperability within a smart grid infrastructure, smart meters are designed to perform functions, and store and communicate data according to certain standards. In this work we discuss smart meter and various elements of smart metering, current state of the technologies related to smart grid, smart meter, advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), and meter data flow in smart grid. We also discuss standards related to smart meter, meter data format and data transmission, functions of smart meter, and functionalities of smart meters, currently deployed by utilities around the world.

Integration of information communication technology via the Internet of Things devices and sensors can enable an efficient power service for utility providers to consumers in advanced metering infrastructure. Authentication and cryptographic mechanisms protect identity, data security and privacy from unauthorised interception for smart meters to servers. In the last couple of years, many key agreement protocols have been prescribed and deployed to fix those issues. Unfortunately, the deployed protocols did not work inside the same protocols, specifically parameter detection and recognition for session key generation, as they entail high computation time and communication bits overheads. Furthermore, the absence of forward secrecy and user anonymity affects the authentication. Therefore, we have proposed a lightweight identity-based key agreement (LIKA) utilising the Diffie–Hellman cryptography with a trusted authority. It seeks to cover both the security and performance criteria with equal weight. The protocol is evaluated by the Canetti and Krawczyk adversarial model, Avispa and cryptographic analysis released the session keys that were not considered as an adversary during mutual authentication. Moreover, as compared to related work, the proposed protocol took the least amount of time (5.319 ms and 1056 bits) for the entire process of session key generation. Furthermore, comparative analysis has shown that the LIKA adequately encompasses computation, communication, and security assessments. Consequently, it is more convenient for practical implementation for a smart grid.

The transmission of consumer energy consumption reports from smart meters to the power management centers over insecure public communication channels exposes this data to numerous privacy and security attacks. This has seen the development of many authentications and key agreement (AKA) protocols to offer protection to the transmitted data. However, majority of these schemes still face many security, privacy and performance issues. Specifically, anonymity and untraceability features are missing in the majority of the current AKA protocols. In this paper, a privacy-preserving traffic signaling protocol is developed. Its security analysis shows that it is robust against impersonation, Man-in-the-Middle (MitM), de-synchronization and replay attacks. In addition, it provides untraceability, anonymity and perfect forward key secrecy. Moreover, it has average computation and storage costs, and the lowest communication costs among other related protocols.

The smart grid concept is introduced to accelerate the operational efficiency and enhance the reliability and sustainability of power supply by operating in self-control mode to find and resolve the problems developed in time. In smart grid, the use of digital technology facilitates the grid with an enhanced data transportation facility using smart sensors known as smart meters. Using these smart meters, various operational functionalities of smart grid can be enhanced, such as generation scheduling, real-time pricing, load management, power quality enhancement, security analysis and enhancement of the system, fault prediction, frequency and voltage monitoring, load forecasting, etc. From the bulk data generated in a smart grid architecture, precise load can be predicted before time to support the energy market. This supports the grid operation to maintain the balance between demand and generation, thus preventing system imbalance and power outages. This study presents a detailed review on load forecasting category, calculation of performance indicators, the data analyzing process for load forecasting, load forecasting using conventional meter information, and the technology used to conduct the task and its challenges. Next, the importance of smart meter-based load forecasting is discussed along with the available approaches. Additionally, the merits of load forecasting conducted using a smart meter over a conventional meter are articulated in this paper.

Smart grid (SG) has been received significant attention due to various services such as renewable energy and demand response. However, SG is fragile to various security attacks because an adversary can eavesdrop, insert, delete, or intercept the exchanged messages over an open channel. Thus, secure and lightweight authentication and key agreement (AKA) scheme for SG to ensure the necessary security requirements. Recently, the existing schemes designed a secure and efficient AKA protocol for industrial SG using cryptographic primitives to ensure reliable energy services. However, we prove that existing schemes for industrial SG are vulnerable to potential security attacks and do not guarantee the necessary security requirements. To enhance the security flaws of the existing schemes, we design a secure and lightweight AKA scheme for SG using fuzzy extractor, called ISG-SLAS. ISG-SLAS resists various security attacks and provides security functionalities. We evaluate the security of the ISG-SLAS using ROR model and AVISPA simulation. Moreover, we present the testbed experiments using MIRACL based on Raspberry PI 4. We then present a comparative analysis between ISG-SLAS and related schemes. Consequently, ISG-SLAS better ensures security and efficiency compared with related schemes and is more suitable than related schemes for practical SG.

To enhance the situational awareness of smart grids, a high volume of data are generated each day from numerous and geographically-dispersed edge devices, such as smart meters, charging piles, portable digital terminals, etc. These data contain sensitive information about smart grids' configurations and topology as well as individual customers' energy consumption patterns. However, data security for heterogeneous and resource-constrained edge devices still remains a big challenge for smart grids. To meet this gap, we are motivated to propose a secure and efficient data transmission scheme for edge devices in smart grids. In this scheme, a hybrid cryptosystem based on the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA) and symmetric encryption method is designed to preserve the data integrity, confidentiality, and authenticity. Security analysis demonstrates the high-level security of our proposed scheme in defending against various types of data-oriented cyber attacks, and extensive experimental results show the efficiency of our proposed scheme.

An efficient dependable smart power grid relies on the secure real-time data collection and transmission service provided by a monitoring system. In such a system, the measuring units, such as phasor measurement units (PMUs) and smart meters (SMs), are critical. These measuring equipments function as sensors in the smart grid. Data exchanges between these sensors and the central controller are protected by various security protocols. These protocols usually contain computationally intensive cryptographic algorithms that cause heavy energy overhead to the sensor nodes. Since PMUs and SMs are mostly energy-constrained, the problem of how to ensure the secure communication with minimum energy cost becomes a critical issue for the functionality of the whole smart grid. In this article, we focus on the low power secure communication of the PMUs and SMs. We take two wireless sensor platforms as examples to experimentally investigate the approaches and principles of reconciling the two conflicting system requirements-communication security and low energy consumptions. The proposed methods are general ones and applicable to other energy-constrained yet security sensitive systems.

The ever-evolving Internet of Things (IoT) has ushered in a new era of intelligent manufacturing across multiple industries. However, the security and privacy of real-time data transmitted over the public channel of the Industrial IoT (IIoT) remain formidable challenges. Existing lightweight protocols often omit one or more critical security features, such as anonymity and untraceability, and are susceptible to threats like desynchronization attacks. Additionally, they struggle to achieve an optimal balance between robust security and performance efficiency. To bridge these gaps, we introduce a new lightweight key agreement security scheme that guarantees secure access to the IIoT-enabled flexible manufacturing system (FMS). The strength of our scheme lies in its utilization of the authenticated encryption with associative data (AEAD) primitive, AEGIS, along with hash functions and physical unclonable functions, which secure the IIoT ecosystem. Additionally, our scheme offers flexibility in the form of the addition of new machines, password updates, and revocation in cases of theft or loss. A comprehensive security analysis demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed scheme in thwarting various attacks. The formal analysis, based on the Real-or-Random (RoR) model, ensures session key indistinguishability, while the informal analysis highlights its resilience against known attacks. The comparative assessment demonstrates that the proposed scheme consistently outperforms the benchmark schemes across multiple dimensions, including security and functionality features, computational and communication overheads, and runtime efficiency. Specifically, the proposed scheme achieves peak performance enhancements of 77.55%, 44.73%, and 69.6% in computational overhead, runtime overhead, and communication overhead, respectively, underscoring its substantial performance advantages.

While real-time electricity consumption data of users in smart grids can enable value-added services, such as Big Data analytics, each individual user's privacy needs to be protected. How to balance data utility and privacy protection is a significant issue, of which privacy-preserving data aggregation (PPDA) is a viable solution. Prior to this, researchers have proposed a number of PPDA schemes to address the above challenge. Unluckily, most of them suffer from security and privacy drawbacks, while others are inappropriate for resource-limited smart meters due to high cost of cryptographic operations. To tackle this issue, in this article, we propose a pairing-free and exponentiation-free certificateless PPDA scheme named CL-PPDA for smart grids. We prove the security of our design and analyze its performance. Comparative analyses with state-of-the-art work in theory and experiment show that our design not only has better security properties, but also has competitive computation overhead, especially on the resource-constrained smart meter side. Besides, we present an extension of our CL-PPDA scheme to support multidimensional data aggregation, which further enriches the functionality of our design.

As a next-generation power system, the smart grid can implement fine-grained smart metering data collection to optimize energy utilization. Smart meters face serious security challenges, such as a trusted third party or a trusted authority being attacked, which leads to the disclosure of user privacy. Blockchain provides a viable solution that can use its key technologies to solve this problem. Blockchain is a new type of decentralized protocol that does not require a trusted third party or a central authority. Therefore, this paper proposes a decentralized privacy-preserving data aggregation (DPPDA) scheme for smart grid based on blockchain. In this scheme, the leader election algorithm is used to select a smart meter in the residential area as a mining node to build a block. The node adopts Paillier cryptosystem algorithm to aggregate the user’s power consumption data. Boneh-Lynn-Shacham short signature and SHA-256 function are applied to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of user data, which is convenient for billing and power regulation. The scheme protects user privacy data while achieving decentralization, without relying on TTP or CA. Security analysis shows that our scheme meets the security and privacy requirements of smart grid data aggregation. The experimental results show that this scheme is more efficient than existing competing schemes in terms of computation and communication overhead.