Securing Demand Response Management: A Certificate-Based Access Control in Smart Grid Edge Computing Infrastructure

The edge computing infrastructure has enabled a massive amount of data in the smart grid environment by a large number of connected automated devices to be processed at the edge of the network in proximity to the data generation source. The demand response management is a fundamental requirement for an efficient and reliable smart grid environment, which can be accomplished by the transfer of data between smart devices and the utility center (UC) in a smart city, very frequently. However, this frequent data transfer is subject to multiple threats including the tempering. Several authentication schemes were proposed to secure smart grid environment. However, many such schemes are either insecure or lack the required efficiency. To counter the threats and to provide efficiency, a new authentication scheme for demand response management (DRMAS) is proposed in this paper. DRMAS provides all necessary security requirements and resists known attacks. The proposed DRMAS is provably secure under formal analysis supplemented by a brief discussion on attack resilience. Moreover, the DRMAS completes the authentication procedure in just 20.11 ms by exchanging only 2 messages.