An elliptic curve cryptography based lightweight authentication scheme for smart grid communication

An evolved grid system, Smart Grid, enables appropriate adjustments in the amount of electricity generation by providing the capability to monitor the consumption behavior of customers. This advance grid system can help to promote cultural heritage because it is responsible to provide un-interruptible and reliable power supply in smart way. Smart grid is one of the key component for enabling smart cities and obviously, any city with more smart amenities will ultimately attract visitors to come and visit rich heritage. In smart grid, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCDA) system is responsible for keeping the underlying communication secure between substations and corresponding control center. While communication between customers and substations needs more enhancements as the existing protocols do not meet the comprehensive security requirements of smart grid. Due to the complex nature of smart grid and diverse security requirements, designing a suitable authentication scheme is a challenging task. For delay sensitive networks like smart grid, an ideal authentication scheme should withstand against all known security attacks, involving lightweight operations with trivial computations. ECC provides same security level with much less key sizes as compared with other security techniques such as RSA, DSA and DH. Keeping in mind the complex and delay sensitive nature of smart grid, a lightweight ECC based authentication scheme is proposed here. The proposed scheme not only provides mutual authentication with low computation and communication cost but also withstand against all known security attacks.