An Anonymous ECC-Based Self-Certified Key Distribution Scheme for the Smart Grid

In the smart grid, the various stakeholders can communicate securely and efficiently only if they employ a proper key distribution scheme. In recent years, a number of key distribution schemes have been proposed to be used in the context of the smart grid. However, some suffer from security challenges, some do not provide the smart meter anonymity, some require high communication and computational costs that make them less suitable for the resource-constrained smart meters, some are based on the public key infrastructure, and most of the newly published ones have the key escrow problem. Therefore, to remedy these challenges, in this paper, we propose an anonymous elliptic curve cryptography-based self-certified key distribution scheme that not only is free from the overhead of the certificate management and the key escrow issue, but also is more efficient than anonymous schemes in terms of both communication and computational costs. More significantly, we have implemented the cryptographic elements on two state-of-the-art ARM chips. First, a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller as a candidate for the smart meter and second, a 64-bit Octa core ARM Cortex-A53 as a candidate for the service provider. We hope that the achieved results be beneficial for other future researches in this field.