Anonymous Key Agreement and Mutual Authentication Protocol for Smart Grids

The security and privacy protection of smart grid data exchanged over the open and public wireless communication channels is critical yet challenging in this environment. Conventionally, public key cryptography, group signatures, blind signatures, identity based schemes and elliptic curve cryptography could provide the much needed security and privacy. However, all these techniques either lack some smart grid security requirements or have intensive communication, storage and computation overheads. This obviously renders them inefficient for resource-constrained smart grid network devices. In this paper, an anonymous key agreement and authentication protocol to address some of these challenges is proposed. The simulation results showed that the proposed protocol is the most efficient in terms of bandwidth and computation requirements. It also required relatively less memory space during its entire execution than some of the related protocols. Further, it is demonstrated that it offers both backward and forward key secrecy, anonymity, and is robust against impersonation, session hijacking, privileged insider, side-channels, packet replays, packet injection and privacy leaks attacks.