We design a new blockchain-based access control protocol in IoT-enabled smart-grid system, called DBACP-IoTSG Through the proposed DBACP-IoTSG, the data is securely brought to the service providers from their respective smart meters (SMs) The peer-to-peer (P2P) network is formed by the participating service providers, where the peer nodes are responsible for creating the blocks from the gathered data securely from their corresponding SMs and adding them into the blockchain after validation of the blocks using the voting-based consensus algorithm In our work, the blockchain is considered as private because the data collected from the consumers of the SMs are private and confidential By the formal security analysis under the random oracle model, nonmathematical security analysis and software-based formal security verification, DBACP-IoTSG is shown to be resistant against various attacks We carry out the experimental results of various cryptographic primitives that are needed for comparative analysis using the widely used multiprecision integer and rational arithmetic cryptographic library (MIRACL) A detailed comparative study reveals that DBACP-IoTSG supports more functionality features and provides better security apart from its low communication and computation costs as compared to recently proposed relevant schemes In addition, the blockchain implementation of DBACP-IoTSG has been performed to measure computational time needed for the varied number of blocks addition and also the varied number of transactions per block in the blockchain

Designing Blockchain-Based Access Control Protocol in IoT-Enabled Smart-Grid System

The smart metering infrastructure plays an important role in smart grid environments. Such metering networks need to be protected against cyber attacks by using authenticated key exchange protocols, and many relevant schemes have been presented by researchers. In addition, in order to protect against the energy theft problem, it is also important to consider physical security of the smart meter. Recently, PUFs (physical uncloneable functions) have gained popularity as a primitive against physical attacks. In 2019, we proposed the first PUF-based authentication scheme for secure smart grid communication with resilience against physical attacks on smart meters. However, recent studies have shown that PUFs are susceptible to modeling attacks. To address this issue, this paper proposes a reconfigurable authenticated key exchange scheme for secure communication in smart grids by using the concept of reconfigurable PUFs. In addition to security, the efficiency evaluation demonstrates that our new scheme has advantages in both the computation and communication costs as compared to the state-of-the-art protocols.

A Privacy-Aware Reconfigurable Authenticated Key Exchange Scheme for Secure Communication in Smart Grids

The information exchanged over the smart grid networks is sensitive and private. As such, proper mechanisms must be put in place to protect these messages from security and privacy violations. Although many schemes have been presented in literature to address these challenges, a number of them rarely consider concurrent authentication of smart meters, while some are inefficient or still lack some of the smart grid network security and privacy requirements. In this article, a novel concurrent smart meters authentication algorithm is presented, based on some trusted authority. Formal security analysis of this algorithm is executed using Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic, which shows that this algorithm provides strong authentication among the smart meter, utility service provider and trusted authority. In addition, session keys are independently computed and verified between the smart meter and utility service provider with the help of the trusted authority. Informal security analysis shows that this algorithm provides device anonymity, perfect forward key secrecy, strong mutual authentication and is resilient against replay, de-synchronization, privileged insider, impersonation, eavesdropping, side-channel, and traceability attacks. In terms of performance, the proposed algorithm exhibits the least communication and computation overheads when compared with other related schemes. 

Trusted authority based session key agreement and authentication algorithm for smart grid networks

In recent times, the research works on the integration of fog computing with blockchain to address the issues such as higher latency, single point of failure, and centralization have expanded considerably. However, only a few works have been done focusing on authentication and key establishment for blockchain-based smart grid (SG) under fog environment. Thus, this paper introduces a mutual authentication and key agreement scheme for blockchain and fog computing based SG environment. Unlike the existing schemes that depend on single trusted authorities for storage and computation tasks, the proposed scheme reduces this dependency by creating a blockchain-based distributed environment assisted by cloud servers and fog nodes. In addition, a secure and shared key is established among smart meter, fog node, and cloud server to achieve message confidentiality between them. A detailed formal and informal security analysis proves that the proposed protocol is secure under the RoR model and achieves the predefined security goals. The blockchain and cryptographic operations are evaluated using hyperledger fabric and cryptographic libraries, respectively. Finally, the performance analysis and comparative study show that the proposed scheme with some additional features is efficient in computational and communication costs.

Blockchain-assisted authentication and key agreement scheme for fog-based smart grid

Electric vehicle charging is becoming more commonplace, but a number of challenges remain. For example, the wireless communications between vehicle users and aggregators can be subject to exploitation and hence, several authentication schemes have been designed to support varying levels of privacy protection. However, there are a number of limitations observed in existing authentication schemes, and examples include lack of anonymity and not considering charging peak in their design (and consequently, not meeting low energy consumption requirement in smart grid environments). More recently, there have been attempts to utilize Chevyshev chaotic map in the design of authentication mechanism, with the aims of reducing computational costs yet achieving high security. However, the security requirements of Chebyshev polynomials pose new challenges to the construction of Chebyshev chaotic maps-based authentication schemes. To solve these limitations, we propose an efficient Chebyshev polynomials algorithm by adopting a square matrix-based binary exponentiation algorithm to provide secure and efficient Chebyshev polynomial computation. We further construct an energy-efficient authentication and key negotiation scheme for the smart grid environments based on the proposed algorithm. Compared with five other competing schemes, our proposed authentication scheme achieves reduced computational and communication costs. In addition, the ProVerif tool is used to analyze the security of our proposed authentication scheme. The results show that the proposed scheme outperforms these five other schemes in terms of computation and communication overheads while achieving privacy preserving.

An Energy-Efficient Authentication Scheme Based on Chebyshev Chaotic Map for Smart Grid Environments

The design of an authenticated key agreement protocol for securing the smart meter communications in smart grid networks has attracted growing attention recently. Typically, realizing mutual authentication and key agreement without active involvement of a trusted third party is expected in this field. Thus, to achieve this aim, several authenticated key agreement schemes for smart grid have been presented; while as investigated in the following section of this work, most of these schemes remain vulnerable to various attacks. Therefore, to design a truly secure authenticated key agreement protocol for smart grid and make some contributions to this field, this work presents our new authenticated key agreement scheme for smart grid using Elliptic Curve Qu-Vanstone (ECQV) implicit certificate as the building block. Our scheme is pairing-free and just uses two passes to realize mutual authentication and key agreement as well as strong credential privacy, making it with high efficiency in both computation and communication overheads. Moreover, its security is formally proved under the widely accepted Canetti and Krawczyk (CK) security model, and is further confirmed by a heuristic security analysis.

Two-Pass Privacy Preserving Authenticated Key Agreement Scheme for Smart Grid

Authenticated key exchange (AKE) is a crucial cryptographic primitive used for establishing an authenticated and confidential communication channel between parties, which has been widely used in our daily life when we surf on the Internet. However, in past decades mutual AKE protocols have been studied extensively in theory, while in many practical environments such as in the Tor anonymity network the mutual authentication property is undesirable. Meanwhile, considering privacy protection is getting more and more attention and one-way AKE protocols play an important role in privacy protection, so no matter in theory or in practice, it is quite meaningful to conduct research on the one-way AKE protocols. In this article, we present a new efficient anonymous one-way AKE protocol, which has strong anonymity and security properties guarantee, and efficiency advantages. Moreover, our new scheme has tight security reduction and is formally proved secure in the random oracle model under the Gap-DH and XCR signature security assumptions.

Jianhua Chen

Papers

Two-Pass Privacy Preserving Authenticated Key Agreement Scheme for Smart Grid

An Efficient One-Way Authenticated Key Exchange Protocol for Anonymity Networks