A Lightweight Authenticated Communication Scheme for Smart Grid

In smart grid, various kinds of sensors have been equipped in smart meters to collect real-time consumption data and execute the instructions from the power management center, which leads to a more robust and customer-friendly grid system. However, a smart grid enables the two-way communication between the electricity supplier and users, which brings security challenges to the smart grid. In this paper, we propose a lightweight authenticated communication scheme for the smart grid, which ensures a secure two-way communication between the smart meters and the neighborhood gateway. Since in the proposed scheme, the smart meters only need to execute the bitwise exclusive-OR operations to encrypt collected usage data, and Lagrange interpolation formula is used to authenticate the sender; the transmitted messages can be real-timely authenticated. On the other side, the storage burden and communication cost of the smart meters can be significantly reduced. The security analysis shows that the messages transmission between the smart meters and the neighborhood gateway can be done in a confidential and authenticated manner. Furthermore, compared with other existing schemes, the performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme has both lower storage and communication cost.