Achieving Light-Weighted Secure Scheme for Communication in a Smart Grid

Abstract

There are many security risks in the communication between the various nodes of the smart grid. Among these security risks, data leakage is a common one, which occurs in communicating between any two smart meters. In the existing studies, the data leakage is tackled by proposing various security strategies. In this paper, we propose a novel security communication scheme to ensure the security of transmission data between two smart meters against external malicious attacks. Specifically, an authentication scheme based on chaos theory is proposed for verifying the identity trustworthiness of smart meters. In the authentication phase, we use a chaos algorithm and a hash function to compute a shared session key that is used for authentication of both communicating parties, as well as for encryption of private information. Our proposed scheme implements a one-time session approach, i.e., each round of communication keys are unrelated to each other. In relevant validation experiments, we verify that the chaotic algorithm is sufficiently time efficient and compare the computational efficiency with other literature in terms of communication expenses, and the results prove that the proposed scheme is of lightweight nature. Finally we use the Proverif formal verification tool the BAN logic to verify the security as well as the feasibility of the proposed scheme.

Keywords

• Smart grid
• privacy protection
• chaos theory
• session keys
• one at a time