A Lightweight Hardware-based Authentication for Secure Smart Grid Energy Storage Units

Next generation smart power grid offers advanced features to enhance the traditional power grid by enabling faster and more user-friendly two-way communications between utility centers and the consumers for a faster, greener, safer, more reliable, and increasingly efficient power delivery. The energy storage units and smart charging stations have become the essential components of a smart power grid. An efficient authentication and key management scheme is proposed in this work to realize a secure and trusted smart charging coordination system using a low-cost data encryption standard (DES) design and a lightweight physical unclonable function. The proposed scheme is implemented and tested on a re-programmable platform using Artix-7 FPGA device. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can be efficiently realized on a off-the-shelf hardware, preserve the privacy of energy storage unit owners, and provide low-cost authentication for different NIST security levels.