One-time symmetric key based cloud supported secure smart meter reading

With wide deployments of Smart Grid systems, a large amount of energy usage and grid status data have been collected by smart meters. To secure those critical and sensitive data, it is crucial to prevent unauthorized readings to smart meters. Many authentication protocols have been proposed to control the access to the smart meters that are a part of Smart Grid data communication network, but authentication protocols to control readings to the isolated smart meters are mostly ignored. In this paper, we design a one-time symmetric key based cloud supported protocol to enable secure data reading from the isolated smart meters. The protocol mainly consists of two steps. First, an asymmetric key based authentication is designed for the reader-cloud authentication. Then, the cloud assists the meter reader to generate a new one-time symmetric key which is shared with the smart meter. Second, a symmetric key based authentication is designed for the reader-meter authentication. Security analysis shows that our protocol is reliable under most typical attacks.