A Secure Lightweight Signcryption Scheme for Smart Grid Communications Using Reliable Physically Unclonable Function

As it is well acknowledged, by using information and communication technology, smart grid enhances the flexibility and efficiency of power grid networks. However, Security is considered as the most important and inevitable challenge of smart grid. Security itself can be interpolated to different meanings and referred to various features based on different needs and applications. Hence, through years many different protocols tried to introduce a secure communication between smart meters (SM) and neighborhood gateways (NG). The most important goals of previous efforts were to bring vital features like confidentiality, authentication, anonymity, etc. alongside the lightweight design. However, the lack of physical security is their most important drawback. To that end, this paper proposes a novel two-way physically secure signcryption scheme based on reliable physically unclonable function (PUF), which not only improves the security and functional features but also outperforms the state of the art in term of computational cost.