LiSA: A Lightweight and Secure Authentication Mechanism for Smart Metering Infrastructure

Smart metering infrastructure (SMI) is the core component of the smart grid (SG) which enables two-way communication between consumers and utility companies to control, monitor, and manage the energy consumption data. Despite their salient features, SMIs equipped with information and communication technology are associated with new threats due to their dependency on public communication networks. Therefore, the security of SMI communications raises the need for robust authentication and key agreement primitives that can satisfy the security requirements of the SG. Thus, in order to realize the aforementioned issues, this paper introduces a lightweight and secure authentication protocol, "LiSA", primarily to secure SMIs in SG setups. The protocol employs Elliptic Curve Cryptography at its core to provide various security features such as mutual authentication, anonymity, replay protection, session key security, and resistance against various attacks. Precisely, LiSA exploits the hardness of the Elliptic Curve Qu Vanstone (EVQV) certificate mechanism along with Elliptic Curve Diffie Hellman Problem (ECDHP) and Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP). Additionally, LiSA is designed to provide the highest level of security relative to the existing schemes with least computational and communicational overheads. For instance, LiSA incurred barely 11.826 ms and 0.992 ms for executing different passes across the smart meter and the service providers. Further, it required a total of 544 bits for message transmission during each session.Comment: To appear in IEEE Globecom 201

Lightweight Data Aggregation Scheme Against Internal Attackers in Smart Grid Using Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Recent advances of Internet and microelectronics technologies have led to the concept of smart grid which has been a widespread concern for industry, governments, and academia. The openness of communications in the smart grid environment makes the system vulnerable to different types of attacks. The implementation of secure communication and the protection of consumers’ privacy have become challenging issues. The data aggregation scheme is an important technique for preserving consumers’ privacy because it can stop the leakage of a specific consumer’s data. To satisfy the security requirements of practical applications, a lot of data aggregation schemes were presented over the last several years. However, most of them suffer from security weaknesses or have poor performances. To reduce computation cost and achieve better security, we construct a lightweight data aggregation scheme against internal attackers in the smart grid environment using Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). Security analysis of our proposed approach shows that it is provably secure and can provide confidentiality, authentication, and integrity. Performance analysis of the proposed scheme demonstrates that both computation and communication costs of the proposed scheme are much lower than the three previous schemes. As a result of these aforementioned benefits, the proposed lightweight data aggregation scheme is more practical for deployment in the smart grid environment

An Efficient Authentication Protocol for Smart Grid Communication Based on On-Chip-Error-Correcting Physical Unclonable Function

Security has become a main concern for the smart grid to move from research and development to industry. The concept of security has usually referred to resistance to threats by an active or passive attacker. However, since smart meters (SMs) are often placed in unprotected areas, physical security has become one of the important security goals in the smart grid. Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) have been largely utilized for ensuring physical security in recent years, though their reliability has remained a major problem to be practically used in cryptographic applications. Although fuzzy extractors have been considered as a solution to solve the reliability problem of PUFs, they put a considerable computational cost to the resource-constrained SMs. To that end, we first propose an on-chip-error-correcting (OCEC) PUF that efficiently generates stable digits for the authentication process. Afterward, we introduce a lightweight authentication protocol between the SMs and neighborhood gateway (NG) based on the proposed PUF. The provable security analysis shows that not only the proposed protocol can stand secure in the Canetti-Krawczyk (CK) adversary model but also provides additional security features. Also, the performance evaluation demonstrates the significant improvement of the proposed scheme in comparison with the state-of-the-art

Privacy and Transparency in Blockchain-based Smart Grid Operations

In the past few years, blockchain technology has emerged in numerous smart grid applications, enabling the construction of systems without the need for a trusted third party. Blockchain offers transparency, traceability, and accountability, which lets various energy management system functionalities be executed through smart contracts, such as monitoring, consumption analysis, and intelligent energy adaptation. Nevertheless, revealing sensitive energy consumption information could render users vulnerable to digital and physical assaults. This paper presents a novel method for achieving a dual balance between privacy and transparency, as well as accountability and verifiability. This equilibrium requires the incorporation of cryptographic tools like Secure Mul- tiparty Computation and Verifiable Secret Sharing within the distributed components of a multi- channel blockchain and its associated smart contracts. We corroborate the suggested architecture throughout the entire process of a Demand Response scenario, from the collection of energy data to the ultimate reward. To address our proposal’s constraints, we present countermeasures against accidental crashes and Byzantine behavior while ensuring that the solution remains appropriate for low-performance IoT devices

Lightweight and privacy-friendly spatial data aggregation for secure power supply and demand management in smart grids

The concept of smart metering allows real-time measurement of power demand which in turn is expected to result in more efficient energy use and better load balancing. However, finely granular measurements reported by smart meters can lead to starkly increased exposure of sensitive information, including various personal attributes and activities. Even though several security solutions have been proposed in recent years to address this issue, most of the existing solutions are based on publickey cryptographic primitives such as homomorphic encryption, elliptic curve digital signature algorithms (ECDSA), etc. which are ill-suited for the resource constrained smart meters. On the other hand, to address the computational inefficiency issue, some masking-based solutions have been proposed. However, these schemes cannot ensure some of the imperative security properties such as consumer’s privacy, sender authentication, etc. In this paper, we first propose a lightweight and privacyfriendly masking-based spatial data aggregation scheme for secure forecasting of power demand in smart grids. Our scheme only uses lightweight cryptographic primitives such as hash functions, exclusive-OR operations, etc. Subsequently, we propose a secure billing solution for smart grids. As compared to existing solutions, our scheme is simple and can ensure better privacy protection and computational efficiency, which are essential for smart grids

A Comprehensive Survey on the Cooperation of Fog Computing Paradigm-Based IoT Applications: Layered Architecture, Real-Time Security Issues, and Solutions

The Internet of Things (IoT) can enable seamless communication between millions of billions of objects. As IoT applications continue to grow, they face several challenges, including high latency, limited processing and storage capacity, and network failures. To address these stated challenges, the fog computing paradigm has been introduced, purpose is to integrate the cloud computing paradigm with IoT to bring the cloud resources closer to the IoT devices. Thus, it extends the computing, storage, and networking facilities toward the edge of the network. However, data processing and storage occur at the IoT devices themselves in the fog-based IoT network, eliminating the need to transmit the data to the cloud. Further, it also provides a faster response as compared to the cloud. Unfortunately, the characteristics of fog-based IoT networks arise traditional real-time security challenges, which may increase severe concern to the end-users. However, this paper aims to focus on fog-based IoT communication, targeting real-time security challenges. In this paper, we examine the layered architecture of fog-based IoT networks along working of IoT applications operating within the context of the fog computing paradigm. Moreover, we highlight real-time security challenges and explore several existing solutions proposed to tackle these challenges. In the end, we investigate the research challenges that need to be addressed and explore potential future research directions that should be followed by the research community.©2023 The Authors. Published by IEEE. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed