Design of an enhanced message authentication scheme for smart grid and its performance analysis on an ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller

Shared key generation between different entities of smart grid is so important because it can provide the possibility of subsequent fast and secure communications by means of symmetric key algorithms. Since the smart meters are some computationally-constrained electronic devices, this shared key generation process must put the least possible burden on the smart meters' resources. To this end, several lightweight authentication and key agreement schemes have been proposed during the last decade to be employed in the context of smart grid. Nevertheless, after careful consideration, we found that the efficiency and security of these schemes can still be improved. As a result, in this paper, we propose an enhanced elliptic curve cryptography based authentication and key agreement scheme that not only is secure against the well-known attacks and provides the perfect forward secrecy, but also is more efficient than similar recently published schemes in terms of both computational and communication costs. More significantly, our formal verification using the commonly-accepted ProVerif tool and implementation on a state-of-the-art Atmel 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller, as a suitable chip for the smart meters, confirm our claim.