An Identity Based Authentication Protocol for Smart Grid Environment Using Physical Uncloneable Function

Smart grid plays an important role in managing demand response management in modern smart city using Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). In smart grid environment, sensors are widely used for surveillance. These are deployed on the high tension power supply lines which help to share the information to control center about line breakage or any other flaw. Besides the cyber-attacks, sensors may also experience physical attacks as they are deployed on high-tension power lines in an open environment. Moreover, an attacker can also impersonate the information exchanged between sensors, gateways and control centers. Therefore, the most indispensable requirement is to prevent these cyber-attacks and physical attacks so that a secure and efficient surveillance system can be maintained for smart grid environment. Motivated from these, in this article, we propose an identity based authentication protocol for power supply-line surveillance in smart grid environment using physical uncloneable function. The performance analysis shows that our proposed protocol is resilient to various cyber-attacks alongwith the physical attacks on sensors. The proposed protocol is efficient as it has less computation cost as compared to various related protocols. Although, the communication cost of devised protocol is slightly higher than some protocols but it also offers three added security features as compared to other related protocols.

I. Introduction

The rapid growth of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) leads to the popularity of smart grids (SGs) in Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. The SG is the power generation system in which the heterogeneous computing, sensing and communication tools and technologies are integrated with each other in order to control and monitor the entire power supply network [1]. The distributed intelligence and the advanced automation in SG offers improved stability, security, reliability and efficiency to its various operations, while providing numerous applications such as demand response management, voltage regulation, smart energy delivery, fault recovery and detection etc.