PUF‐based solutions for secure communications in Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI)

Abstract

AbstractAdvanced metering infrastructure (AMI) provides 2‐way communications between the utility and the smart meters. Developing authenticated key exchange (AKE) and broadcast authentication (BA) protocols is essential to provide secure communications in AMI. The security of all existing cryptographic protocols is based on the assumption that secret information is stored in the nonvolatile memories. In the AMI, the attackers can obtain some or all of the stored secret information from memories by a great variety of inexpensive and fast side‐channel attacks. Thus, all existing AKE and BA protocols are no longer secure. In this paper, we investigate how to develop secure AKE and BA protocols in the presence of memory attacks. As a solution, we propose to embed a physical unclonable function (PUF) in each party, which generates the secret values as required without the need to store them. By combining PUFs and 2 well‐known and secure protocols, we propose PUF‐based AKE and BA protocols. We show that our proposed protocols are memory leakage resilient. In addition, we prove their security in the standard model. Performance analysis of both protocols shows their efficiency for AMI applications. The proposed protocols can be easily implemented.