A secure and efficient authenticated key exchange scheme for smart grid

Smart grid provides convenience for power generation, consumption and distribution. Authenticated key exchange (AKE) is a fundamental technique to protect data transmission from interception and tampering in smart grid. However, since the smart meters only have limited resources in computation and communication, most of the existing AKE schemes are inefficient for smart grid. First, many schemes have to use large security parameters to compensate the loose reduction in their security proofs. Second, most of these schemes require at least three-round of communication to negotiate a secret session key with explicit key confirmation. To alleviate these issues, we propose a novel two-round AKE scheme with tight security for smart grid. Our proposed scheme integrates Diffie-Hellman key exchange and a tightly secure digital signature, in which not only mutual authentication can be realized but also the communicating parties can confirm that session keys are negotiated between them explicitly. Compared with the existing AKE schemes, the overheads in both communication and computation are lighter in our proposed scheme, because fewer rounds of communication are required and smaller security parameters can be used to achieve the same security level. Therefore, our scheme contributes to a more practical solution for secure key establishment in smart grid.