Emas: an efficient MLWE-based authentication scheme for advanced metering infrastructure in smart grid environment

Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) plays a critical role in the smart grid by integrating metering systems with communication capabilities, especially for the industrial internet of things. However, existing authentication protocols have proven ineffective against quantum computing attacks and are computationally intensive since AMI contains limited computing components, such as smart meters. In this paper, we present a novel, efficient module learning with errors-based authentication and key agreement system for AMI, which we call EMAS. As part of the security measures of EMAS, Kyber Post-Quantum Public Key Encryption, a one-time pad mechanism, and hash functions are used. A formal and informal analysis of the security features is presented, showing that the proposed system is secure and resistant to known attacks. The performance analysis of our proposed EMAS on a B-L475E-IOT01A node equipped with a ARM Cortex M4 microcontroller shows that EMAS is more efficient than existing relevant schemes. About the computation time, EMAS takes 15.693 ms. This result is lower than other existing relevant schemes. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2024.