A novel efficient and lightweight authentication scheme for secure smart grid communication systems

The smart grid designates an innovative technology integrating new information and communication technologies to modernize the energy distribution network and facilitate the transmission of consumption and billing data between production and distribution points. However, the data transmission over the network allows attackers to listen to and subsequently falsify these data, which poses a significant security problem. For this reason, various research works have been very successful in the past decades, with many proposals and improvements over time. However, many suffer from recurring problems regarding high computation and communication costs, and others have been vulnerable to several types of attacks. All these observations have led us to devise a new scheme that provides mutual authentication and authenticated key agreement, which aims to preserve the privacy and security of all communications exchanged in the smart grid against any attack attempt aimed at during network migrations. The experimental results confirm the efficiency and reliability of our contribution in terms of calculation and communication costs and show that our solution provides a high level of security with minimal general costs compared to other competing solutions proposed in the literature.