Efficient and Provably Secure Key Agreement for Modern Smart Metering Communications

Abstract

Security in modern smart metering communications and in smart grid networks has been an area of interest recently. In this field, identity-based mutual authentication including credential privacy without active involvement of a trusted third party is an important building block for smart grid technology. Recently, several schemes have been proposed for the smart grid with various security features (e.g., mutual authentication and key agreement). Moreover, these schemes are said to offer session key security under the widely accepted Canetti-Krawczyk (CK) security model. Instead, we argue that all of them are still vulnerable under the CK model. To remedy the problem, we present a new provably secure key agreement model for smart metering communications. The proposed model preserves the security features and provides more resistance against a denial of service attack. Moreover, our scheme is pairing-free, resulting in highly efficient computational and communication efforts.