A lightweight authentication scheme with privacy protection for smart grid communications

In smart grid, the “smartness” usually comes from the two-way communication between the utility and its users as well as the sensing along the transmission lines. As a result, securing grid data that are transmitted over public network has always been one big challenge. Different authentication schemes have been proposed to address this security problem. However, most of them still suffer from privacy and/or performance issues. In this paper, we propose a lightweight anonymous authentication and key agreement scheme for smart grid, which allows the smart meter and the service provider to authenticate each other and establish a shared session key between them. Compared with existing authentication solutions for smart grid, it achieves fast mutual authentication between the smart meter and the service provider while ensuring the smart meter anonymity and untraceability. We evaluate the proposed scheme using Real-or-Random Oracle Model as well as the actual hardware prototype implementation. The results show that our proposed scheme can outperform the state-of-the art schemes in terms of the performance overhead while ensuring privacy protection.