An anonymous key agreement protocol with robust authentication for smart grid infrastructure

This letter claimed that Mahmood et al.’s scheme still exhibited some vulnerabilities. Concretely, their scheme cannot withstand an impersonation attack and fails to realize perfect forward secrecy and mutual authentication with the absence of the trusted authority. Moreover, their scheme could suffer from an ephemeral key compromise attack under the CK threat model. We, therefore, fixed those weaknesses and proposed a new security-enhanced scheme where we changed the session keys’ format and added robust authentication between the smart meter and utility control. The computation cost, however, is higher in the new scheme (seen in Appendix D) and we do not solve the key escrow problem. In the future, we wish to design protocol with computation cost declined and give solutions to the key escrow problem for the smart grid infrastructure. © 2021, Science China Press and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.