Anonymous Authentication Protocol Based on Physical Unclonable Function and Elliptic Curve Cryptography for Smart Grid

Smart grid (SG) achieves more convenient and efficient power transmission through the rapid development of the information and communication technology. In addition to the transmission of electrical energy, the SG system also involves privacy and control information of service providers, which is closely related to people's livelihood. However, at present, the data in the SG system are transmitted in the form of plaintext, which does not have complete protection measures for entity privacy and communication data security. Focusing on preserving entity privacy and data security, this article proposes an anonymous secure authentication protocol (ASAP-SG) for the SG environment. Based on elliptic curve cryptography and physical unclonable function, ASAP-SG can realize authentication and key agreement between smart meters and service providers. The security of ASAP-SG has been verified with proverif tool and proven strictly under the real-or-random model. Furthermore, heuristic analysis manifests that ASAP-SG can successfully resist known security attacks. Finally, a fully comparison with the other five most advanced schemes reveals that ASAP-SG consumes the optimal computation cost on both smart meters and service providers and reduces the communication overhead by 33.3%–45.8%, on the basis of satisfying ten security objectives. These features make ASAP-SG more suitable for resource-constrained SG environment.