A Noval and Efficient ECC-Based Authenticated Key Agreement Scheme for Smart Metering in the Smart Grid

With the gradual maturity of the smart grid (SG), security challenges have become one of the important issues that needs to be addressed urgently. In SG, the identity authentication and key agreement protocol between a smart meter (SM) and an aggregator (AG) is a prerequisite for both parties to establish a secure communication. Some of the existing solutions require high communication cost, some have key escrow problems and security defects. Elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC) holds the feature of low-key requirement and high security to make it more suitable for the security solutions to the communications in SG. In this paper, we propose a mutual anonymous authentication with an ECC-based key agreement scheme to secure the communications in SG. In addition, we compare our scheme with other existing schemes by the number of encryption operations, the computation delay, and the communication cost. The results indicate that our scheme is more efficient without the loss of safety properties.