Towards the Use of Pairing-Based Cryptography for Resource-Constrained Home Area Networks

In the prevailing smart grid, the Home Area Network (HAN) will become a critical infrastructure component at the consumer premises. The HAN provides the electricity infrastructure with a bi-directional communication infrastructure that allows monitoring and control of electrical appliances. HANs are typically equipped with wireless sensors and actuators, built from resource-constrained hardware devices, that communicate by using open standard protocols. This raises concerns on the security of these networked systems. Because of this, securing a HAN to a proper degree becomes an increasingly important task. In this paper, a security model, where an adversary may exploit the system both during HAN setup as well as during operations of the network, is considered. We propose a scheme for secure bootstrapping of wireless HAN devices based on Identity-Based Cryptography (IBC). The scheme minimizes the number of exchanged messages needed to establish a session key between HAN devices. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated from a series of prototype experiments.