Privacy Preservation Protocol for Smart Grid Networks

Smart grids networks carry critical and private data that may be employed by adversaries in learning about services running at home or its occupancy. It is therefore vital that robust protection be accorded to these complex infrastructures to thwart cyber-physical attacks. Although numerous cryptographic protocols have been developed for smart grid systems, majority of them do not consider de-synchronization attacks among others, or they lack conditional privacy and flexible key management. In terms of performance, they have high computation and communication overheads that are not ideal for resource constrained smart meters. In this paper, a lightweight privacy preservation protocol is proposed. Simulation results showed that it experienced the lowest computation and communication overheads among its peers. In addition, security evaluation using the widely known Dolev-Yao and Canetti-Krawczyk models showed that it offers backward secrecy, forward key secrecy, anonymity and is robust against de-synchronization and traceability attacks.