An Enhanced Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Smart Grid Communication

The rapid evolution of the smart grid has made the security and reliability of communication within the power system an urgent and critically important issue. To address this challenge, authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocols have gained significant attention and are regarded as indispensable tools for ensuring the secure operation of the smart grid. However, traditional AKA protocols are plagued by a series of issues, including cumbersome certificate management, delayed certificate revocation, and vulnerability to man-in-the-middle attacks. With the emergence of certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC), the integration of conventional AKA protocols with CL-PKC has emerged as a prominent trend. This article presents an enhanced certificateless AKA protocol for smart grids, named ECL-AKA. First, this article outlines the architecture and security model of this protocol. Subsequently, it presents the complete workflow of the ECL-AKA protocol. Notably, the ECL-AKA protocol introduces a private key verification step before key agreement, allowing for rapid screening of malicious requests at a lower computational cost, thereby enhancing the protocol’s resistance to various types of attacks. In addition, the ECL-AKA’s security is formally established through rigorous theoretical proofs based on the random oracle model in this article. Finally, comparative experimental analysis demonstrates that the ECL-AKA exhibits lower computational and communication overhead while satisfying essential security attributes.