A secure and privacy preserving lightweight authentication scheme for smart-grid communication using elliptic curve cryptography

Abstract

Abstract In last few decades, smart-grid architecture has evolved as a new power service provider that can accomplish regulations of power generation with significant capabilities to monitor power consumption behaviour of the consumers and help in stabilization of the power system. With the huge progress of the delay sensitive smart grid network, it has to encounter various challenges. One of them is cyber-threats to the transmitted messages, control information of the smart-grid, and privacy-preservation of the consumers over smart-grid environment that leave annihilate consequences in real word. One of the key solutions of these cyber-threats is mutual authentication and setting up safe communication between the consumer and the utility-provider. In this paper, we have addressed novel mutual authentication scheme between consumer and substations formed on elliptic curve cryptography with trifling operations for smart-grid environment that is robust against all possible security threats. This scheme also provides a session key negotiation phase to provide secure communication with significantly less communication and computation overheads. The mathematical security testingand formal security testing using broadly-accepted BAN-logic has established that our scheme is robust against all relevant security threats. Further, the simulation result of the proposed schemethrough well-known AVISPA confirms that our scheme is well secure.Finally, to validate the practical ability, the proposed scheme is evaluated using well-accepted network simulator tool NS-2, that shows the proposed scheme is efficient to be implemented in realistic scenario.