A tailored authentication and key management for smart grid

Smart Grid (SG) is a vulnerable system and can be attacked even from aboard, attacks that may cause different level of costly issues and harms on the society as well as on the system devices. Furthermore, in SG we have a variety of subsystems and applications as well as networks which are working together as a System of System (SoS) model. Therefore one of the most challenging topic in the SG development is security and privacy. Designing a mutual authentication scheme and then a key management protocol are the first tailored steps of designing and implementing the security aspects of any system like SG. In this paper we improve and implement the Secure Remote Password protocol to reach a mutual authentication scheme between a Home Area Network (HAN) Smart Meter (SM) and an authentication server in SG using an initial password. We propose using the Public Key Infrastructure for the SG communications, for instance between SM and aggregator (outside of HAN). Also, in order to have an efficient key management protocol, we follow an enhanced model of the Identity-Based cryptography so-called EIBC. Our proposed mechanisms are capable of preventing various attacks, and at the same time, improves the network overhead caused by the key management controlling packets. In fact, mostly by generating and broadcasting only one function periodically by the key generator entity, our protocol simply refreshes entire nodes public/private key pairs as well as multicast required keys, if any.

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