Title :
Efficient Authentication and Key Management Mechanisms for Smart Grid Communications
Author :
Nicanfar, Hasen ; Jokar, P. ; Beznosov, Konstantin ; Leung, Victor C. M.
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Univ. of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Abstract :
A smart grid (SG) consists of many subsystems and networks, all working together as a system of systems, many of which are vulnerable and can be attacked remotely. Therefore, security has been identified as one of the most challenging topics in SG development, and designing a mutual authentication scheme and a key management protocol is the first important step. This paper proposes an efficient scheme that mutually authenticates a smart meter of a home area network and an authentication server in SG by utilizing an initial password, by decreasing the number of steps in the secure remote password protocol from five to three and the number of exchanged packets from four to three. Furthermore, we propose an efficient key management protocol based on our enhanced identity-based cryptography for secure SG communications using the public key infrastructure. Our proposed mechanisms are capable of preventing various attacks while reducing the management overhead. The improved efficiency for key management is realized by periodically refreshing all public/private key pairs as well as any multicast keys in all the nodes using only one newly generated function broadcasted by the key generator entity. Security and performance analyses are presented to demonstrate these desirable attributes.
Keywords :
authorisation; cryptographic protocols; home networks; public key cryptography; smart power grids; authentication server; home area network; identity-based cryptography; initial password; key generator entity; key management protocol; management overhead; public key infrastructure; public-private key pairs; secure remote password protocol; smart grid communications; Authentication; Protocols; Public key; Servers; Synthetic aperture sonar; Enhanced identity-based cryptography (EIBC); key management; mutual authentication; secure remote password (SRP); security; smart grid (SG); smart meter (SM);
Journal_Title :
Systems Journal, IEEE
DOI :
10.1109/JSYST.2013.2260942