An Ultra-Lightweight and Provably Secure Broadcast Authentication Protocol for Smart Grid Communications

Abstract

The information and communication technology (ICT) can bring attractive features to the traditional power grid such as energy conserving, reliability, efficiency, transparency, and cost reducing. All of these features can be accomplished with a concept called smart grid. However, the use of ICT introduces new challenges in security issue. There are many researches in recent years which have studied security as the most important challenge of the smart grid. Based on these researches, two important issues for the smart grid security protocols must be considered. In the first issue, the important security requirement such as confidentiality, authentication, integrity, etc. needs to be fulfilled. However, the cryptographic algorithms impose significant level of storage, communication, and computational costs to the system while, the smart meters are resource-constrained devices. Therefore, lightweight design of the security schemes is considered as another important issue. To that end, this paper proposes a novel provably secure broadcast authentication scheme based on one-way hash function, which not only can resist to the possible existing attacks but also dramatically reduces the storage and computational costs.