Highly-Secure Yet Efficient Blockchain-Based CRL-Free Key Management Protocol for IoT-Enabled Smart Grid Environments

The Internet of Things (IoT) has advanced smart grid (SG) infrastructure by providing smart meters (SMs) with enhanced capabilities such as the ability to leverage the Internet platform for bidirectional information exchange. Cryptographic keys are necessary for securely exchanging sensitive information between SMs and energy providers. To manage these keys, a secure key management protocol (KMP) with little overhead and influence on the SG’s overall performance is necessary. Although various KMPs are available for IoT-enabled SG environments, exiting solutions have several flaws in terms of certificate revocation, security requirements, and overall SG performance. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a blockchain-based computationally-efficient and highly-secure KMP for IoT-enabled SG environments. We show that, compared to existing solutions, the proposed KMP has better SM side efficiency with improved security and more properties such as perfect forward secrecy, conditional anonymity, and simple SM revocation.