LSPA-SGs: A lightweight and secure protocol for authentication and key agreement based Elliptic Curve Cryptography in smart grids

The importance of smart grids is growing at present, in tendency with the trend of many countries around the world towards the smart city model and enhancing the efficiency of the energy sector, leading to a safer and more sustainable future. On the other hand, there is an urgent need to address the security concerns related to smart grids. Recently, the PALK scheme was designed, which its designers claimed to be a secure protocol and work efficiently. Our revision proved that it contains two security vulnerabilities; user anonymity and guessing password attacks. So, in this paper, we designed a lightweight and robust authentication and key agreement protocol LSPA based on ECC for smart grid. The LSPA takes into consideration the flaws in the PALK scheme. It was verified formally by the Scyther tool to show that it withstands many attacks. Moreover, the informal proof shows that the LSPA scheme is secure and resistant to many attacks. Finally, the performance analysis for PALK and LSPA shows that LSPA is better in terms of communications and computations costs than the PALK scheme. (c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

The importance of smart grids is growing in line with the global trend towards smart city models and increasing energy sector efficiency. However, addressing security concerns is urgently needed. The PALK scheme was found to have security vulnerabilities, leading to the design of a new authentication and key agreement protocol called LSPA. It was formally verified to withstand attacks and shown to have better communication and computation costs than the PALK scheme.