LLRA: A Lightweight Leakage-Resilient Authentication Key Exchange Scheme for Smart Meters

The authentication between smart meters and Neighbourhood Area Communication Network (NAN) gateways is a critical issue due to various types of side channel attacks. To address this, a new protocol called Lightweight Leakage-Resilient Authentication Key Exchange (LLRA) was proposed for smart meters. LLRA incorporates continuous after-the-fact leakage-resilient property. Furthermore, extended BPR (CLR-eBPR) security model and extended GNY (CLR-eGNY) logic were introduced. Through provable security analysis, logic analysis, and practical performance evaluations, we demonstrated that LLRA effectively mitigates side-channel attacks while maintaining minimum authentication delay and energy consumption for the computing devices used in smart meters and NAN gateways. Compared to benchmark protocols, the authentication delay of LLRA was decreased by at least 14%; in addition, the energy consumption of LLRA was decreased by at least 7%.