Provably Secure and Lightweight Authentication Key Agreement Scheme for Smart Meters

Smart Grid is an indispensable part of the Internet of Things (IoT) and has the potential to revolutionise the electricity energy industry. Smart meters, as an important component of Smart Grid, are responsible for the exchange of information between end consumers and service providers. Smart meters and service providers need to use authentication key exchange protocols (AKE) to establish a secure session for secure information transmission. However, The current state-of-the-art lightweight solutions do not support identity anonymity and mostly have high communication costs. This paper proposes a lightweight and secure mutual authentication scheme, which is particularly designed for devices with limited computing capability to provide identity anonymity such as smart meters, based on the Shangyong Mima 2 (SM2) AKE protocol stipulated by the State Cryptography Administration of China. We conducted formal analysis of the security of the proposed scheme and proved its security. In addition, the computational overhead of the protocol was evaluated through performance analysis. Compared with related lightweight protocols, our scheme can reduce up to 30%-40% computational overhead. The results verified that the proposed scheme is indeed suitable for secure communication involving devices with constrained computing capability.