Certificate-less authenticated key agreement scheme with anonymity for smart grid communications

Abstract

The modern grid has various functionalities by using remote sensor automation in power management, monitoring and controlling the system. Thus, it is imperative to ensure secure communications for various agents in smart grid, since the system is information communication based. Being information based the smart grid encounters security and privacy challenges impeding its adoption. One way of dealing with these cyber concerns is in devising robust cryptosystem for data encryption and authenticated key agreement in the communications of these remotely controlled smart devices. However, many proposed solutions are provided at the expense of computations cost. Thus, this paper designs a novel authenticated key agreement scheme with anonymity based on widely acceptable elliptic curve cryptography with efficiency. The scheme ensures optimal computation and communication overload whilst achieving mutual authentication and anonymity in the key agreement process. The scheme is proven in both formal and informal security analysis in portraying its satisfaction of the standard and extended Canetti–Krawczyk (eCK) security requirements. A comparative analysis with related schemes indicates that the proposed scheme have merits over others.