Masked Symmetric Key Encrypted Verification Codes for Secure Authentication in Smart Grid Networks

Although many smart grid authentication protocols have been presented in literature, majority of them remain susceptible to numerous attacks. In addition, some of these protocols are based on computationally intensive cryptographic primitives, which render them inefficient. To address some of these challenges, a protocol based on masked symmetric key encrypted verification codes is presented in this paper. The security analysis carried out shows that this protocol provides message confidentiality, unlinkability, and traceability for malicious network entities. It is also resilient against side-channel and forgery attacks. In terms of efficiency, limited numbers of elliptic curve multiplication and one way-hashing operations are executed during mutual authentication, message signing and verification. As such, this protocol exhibits the least computation and communication complexities in comparison with its peers.