Mitigation of Man-in-the-Middle Attack in Advanced Metering Infrastructure Through Behavioral Biometrics-Based Elliptic Curve Cryptography

In advanced metering infrastructure, the bidirectional communication over insecure public channels between smart meters and the data concentrator is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attack. Existing schemes often exhibit insecurities or inefficiencies, necessitating an efficient and secure authentication scheme for advanced metering infrastructure. To address these challenges, this proposal presents an energy-efficient and secured behavioral biometrics based certificateless authentication and key agreement protocol using elliptic curve cryptography. The protocol includes encrypted registration, behavioral biometrics-based identity validation, identity binding through behavioral biometrics and implicit authentication of entities’ public key to mitigate man-in-the-middle attack and its variants. The proposed protocol for real-time advanced metering infrastructure testbed is implemented using Python and security is analyzed through Pro-Verif tool. The performance evaluation confirms that the proposed scheme meets security requirements while minimizing computation and communication costs in terms of energy, thereby showcasing its superiority among counterparts and its suitability for resource-constrained smart grid environments.