An efficient and provably secure certificateless protocol for the power internet of things

The Power Internet of Things (IoT) is a specific application of the IoT in the power grid. The threat existing in the Power IoT mainly comes from the terminal deployed in the open environ-ment, which has the risk of being tampered with and impersonated. Thus, we design a certificateless anonymous key agreement protocol for the Power IoT to solve the problem of terminal access. The proposed protocol completes session key agreement in only one round exchange of key materials on the basis of certificatelessness, which saves the cost of certificate management. It also achieves anon-ymity by encrypting the authentication information to ensure the identity privacy of terminals. In addition, the protocol prevents malicious connections of internal systems by setting up software defined perimeter (SDP) controllers to complete pre-access authentication of terminals. Moreover, an improved eCK security model is designed and applied to demonstrate the proposed protocol. An experiment and analyses indicate that our scheme has advantages in terms of the communication and computation costs that are suitable for Power IoT.(c) 2023 THE AUTHORS. Published by Elsevier BV on behalf of Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

This study designs a certificateless anonymous key agreement protocol for the Power IoT, which solves the problem of terminal access. The protocol ensures anonymity and prevents malicious connections by encrypting authentication information and setting up SDP controllers. Experimental results demonstrate the advantages of this scheme in terms of communication and computation costs.