A Secure and Efficient Key Establishment Scheme for Communications of Smart Meters and Service Providers in Smart Grid

Abstract

Security is an indispensable part of smart grid (SG). Key establishment protocols play a vital role in fulfilling the security requirements in SG. In recent years, many key establishment schemes have been proposed for SG. However, only three of them offer the strong smart meter anonymity. In 2015, Tsai and Lo presented an anonymous key establishment scheme to be employed in SG. Recently, Odelu et al. have demonstrated that Tsai and Lo's scheme suffers from the ephemeral secret leakage attack. Furthermore, another scheme has been proposed recently by He et al. that has improved the efficiency of Tsai and Lo's scheme. However, besides its merits, we indicate that He et al. 's scheme suffers from both known session-specific temporary information attack and private key leakage. Additionally, these three anonymous schemes have the key escrow problem since the trusted anchor is aware of entities’ private key. Hence, to cover the existing issues, in this paper we propose a key establishment scheme that not only is free from the security challenges of the previous anonymous schemes and key escrow problem, but also is efficient in terms of both computational and communication costs. Finally, yet importantly, we present the performance analysis of our proposed scheme on a state-of-the-art advanced RISC machine (ARM) chip, namely NXP LPC1788, as a suitable hardware for the smart meters.