A Lightweight Mutual Authentication for Smart Grid Neighborhood Area Network Communications Based on Physically Unclonable Function

Smart grid as the future of power system improves efficiency, flexibility, and reliability by employing the information and communication technologies. However, these new technologies cause some challenges in security issues in the smart grid. In addition to the active and passive attacks in the communication link, such as tampering and eavesdropping, the physical attacks can also be performed on smart meters. In the absence of hardware protection, physical attacks could easily disrupt the major performance of the system. On the other hand, the security schemes must be designed as lightweight as possible according to the constrained resource of the smart meters. To solve the mentioned problems simultaneously, this article proposes a secure and lightweight protocol based on physically unclonable function for communication between the neighborhood gateways and smart meters. The security analysis shows that the proposed scheme not only resists against the all possible cyber and physical attacks, but also provides confidentiality, integrity, and mutual authentication. Moreover, the comparative performance evaluation demonstrates that the proposed scheme is efficient in terms of usage of storage space, communication overhead, and computational cost.