PKIF-AKA: A Public Key Infrastructure Free Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol for Smart Grid Communication
Sachin Choudhary, Abhimanyu Kumar, Krishan Kumar
Abstract
In smart grid communication, tampering and illegally accessing power data can lead to ambiguous decisions that disturb power demand management and may lead to system failure. Hence, an efficient security protocol is required to secure smart grid communications. This paper proposes a secure authenticated key agreement scheme to establish a session key between smart meters and service providers. The session key is further used to securely share crucial information like power consumption reports and smart appliances. The proposed scheme is free from the requirement of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to authenticate the public key, which makes it more reliable to implement. The security analysis shows that the protocol is secure against all security attacks possible over a key agreement protocol. As the proposed technique uses a 160-bit ECC key, it offers the same level of security with lighter computation. As per the performance evaluation, the proposed technique can establish the session key between the smart meter and service provider in just 13.744 ms, showing its efficiency over the other existing protocols in the literature.