Temporary Symmetric Key Based Message Verification Protocol for Smart Energy Networks

Smart grid networks require sufficient protection so as to safeguard the sensitive data that is exchanged among the smart meter, gateway node, data aggregators and utility service providers. To this end, numerous schemes have been presented based on a myriad of techniques such as public key cryptography, bilinear pairing operations, device identities and elliptic curve cryptography among others. However, many security loopholes still lurk in these protocols. In addition, performance is another serious issue that needs to be solved especially for smart gas meters. In this paper, a symmetric key based message verification protocol is presented. Extensive security evaluation is executed to show that the proposed protocol offers mutual authentication, key agreement and untraceability. It is also resilient against man-in-the-middle, verifier leakage, message replay, impersonation and known session key attacks. In terms of performance, the proposed protocol has the least communication costs and lower computation overheads compared with its peers.