WIP: Performance Metrics of PUF-based Authentication Protocols for Smart Grid: A Review

The smart grid is a fast-developing system that allows for transmitting electrical data across networks. The systems within the grid cover homes, buildings, and wide area networks. The two-way communication between entities causes the grid to become vulnerable to cyberattacks, impacting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the system. Numerous papers outline the possible attacks that could affect the grid while also outlining protective measures to support the smart grid against these cyberattacks. Authentication is one measure proposed to increase the security of the smart grid. Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have recently been implemented in the context of authentication protocols to mitigate attacks. However, the protocols proposed within recent literature all use contrasting evaluation metrics to evaluate their protocols. This paper reviews the metrics utilized within the PUF authentication literature and outlines the limitations of existing metrics. In addition to the inadequacy of the metrics, an insufficient number of metrics have been utilized in recent works. Future work is outlined to find a set of metrics to evaluate PUF-based authentication protocols for the smart grid.