Two-Pass Privacy Preserving Authenticated Key Agreement Scheme for Smart Grid

Abstract

The design of an authenticated key agreement protocol for securing the smart meter communications in smart grid networks has attracted growing attention recently. Typically, realizing mutual authentication and key agreement without active involvement of a trusted third party is expected in this field. Thus, to achieve this aim, several authenticated key agreement schemes for smart grid have been presented; while as investigated in the following section of this work, most of these schemes remain vulnerable to various attacks. Therefore, to design a truly secure authenticated key agreement protocol for smart grid and make some contributions to this field, this work presents our new authenticated key agreement scheme for smart grid using Elliptic Curve Qu-Vanstone (ECQV) implicit certificate as the building block. Our scheme is pairing-free and just uses two passes to realize mutual authentication and key agreement as well as strong credential privacy, making it with high efficiency in both computation and communication overheads. Moreover, its security is formally proved under the widely accepted Canetti and Krawczyk (CK) security model, and is further confirmed by a heuristic security analysis.