Lightweight Authentication for Resource-Constrained Devices in Smart Grid

In recent years, with the rapid development of the Internet of Things, cloud computing, edge computing and other technologies, more and more resource-constrained devices appears, and these devices are widely used in various scenarios such as smart city, transportation, energy, logistics, medical care, social media and so on. Smart meter in smart grid is a device with limited resources. At the same time, the security of smart grid is also concerned. Based on identity-based encryption technology, an identity-based authentication protocol is proposed, which provides a novel method for the authentication of resource-constrained devices in smart grid. Our proposed protocol is based on the elliptic curve without bilinear pairing, and mainly adopts lightweight operations such as hash and XOR. It is a lightweight authentication protocol, which can provide two-way identity authentication and anonymity assurance. We also compared it with the existing schemes in terms of computational cost.