Design of secure yet efficient authenticated key agreement for smart grid systems

The modern smart grid has emerged not merely as an evolution of traditional power infrastructure but as an intelligent, bidirectional electricity service platform capable of enhancing generation efficiency, enabling fine-grained monitoring of consumer behavior, and contributing to overall grid stability. A critical enabler of this transformation is the integration of resource-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices particularly smart meters into the grid architecture. However, this integration introduces significant security challenges, especially concerning lightweight yet robust authentication mechanisms. Conventional authentication and key agreement protocols often impose prohibitive computational and communication overheads, rendering them ill-suited for deployment in such constrained environments. To address this gap, we propose a novel lightweight mutual authentication and key agreement protocol based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), specifically tailored for IoT-enabled smart grids. Our scheme establishes direct, two-way authentication between smart meters and utility service providers without requiring continuous involvement of a trusted third party beyond an initial secure registration phase. It supports the derivation of ephemeral session keys with perfect forward secrecy and demonstrates resilience against a comprehensive threat model, including replay, man-in-the-middle, and impersonation attacks. We substantiate the security guarantees of our protocol through both informal reasoning and formal verification using Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic, Furthermore, extensive performance evaluations demonstrate that our approach achieves substantial reductions in computational latency, energy consumption, and communication overhead when benchmarked against state-of-the-art protocols. These results confirm the practicality and scalability of our solution for securing large-scale, resource-constrained IoT deployments within next-generation smart grids.

کلیدواژه ها:

Smart grid ، Smart meter ، Service provider ، BAN Logic ، Session key ، Man-in-the- Middle attack