Security assessment and improvement of smart grid NIKE protocol

Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) is a fundamental functional module of Smart Grid that supports mutual communication between customers and electric companies. In order to secure AMI communication, scholars have proposed many key management schemes, some of which suffer from security issues or high costs. Recently, Mohammadali et al. proposed a key establishment NIKE protocol based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography. In this paper, we demonstrate that the protocol is vulnerable to both replay and tampering attacks and does not provide user anonymity. For the security vulnerabilities of the NIKE protocol, we propose an improvement scheme. And the proposed scheme is analyzed and verified for security based on the random oracle model and formal tools. Finally, we perform performance analysis of the improved scheme and the results show that the scheme has low communication and computation costs.