More efficient key establishment protocol for smart grid communications: Design and experimental evaluation on ARM-based hardware

Abstract The aging infrastructure of the existing power grid is envisioned to be replaced by smart grid. The main achievement of this new technology is bidirectional digital communications. These types of communications are susceptible to numerous security threats. The key establishment protocols play a vital role in offering secure communication channels. Hereupon, in recent years, a number of key establishment protocols have been suggested to be used in the context of smart grid. Nonetheless, delving into the existing protocols of this field demonstrates that the secure schemes are not quite lightweight to be used by the resource-constrained smart meters and most of the recently-published ones are insecure against well-known attacks. Therefore, to remedy these challenges, this paper proposes a novel key establishment protocol that not only is secure under the strict Canetti and Krawczyk threat model, but also is more efficient in terms of both running time and communication overhead than the protocols presented thus far. The security analysis, which is done in both a descriptive informal manner and using an automatic formal verifier, together with an exhaustive comparative efficiency analysis confirm the claim of this paper. Moreover, to give realistic running time on a proper hardware for the smart meters, we have taken the advantage of an ARM microcontroller from the STM Company in order to implement the different cryptographic elements, which are used in the proposed scheme, and to evaluate its efficiency under two use case scenarios. We hope that the achieved results be beneficial for similar future researches in this field.