A Trusted Authentication Scheme for IoT-based Smart Grid Applications

Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) network, which is an example of the benefits of IoT technology in the power grid system, offers two-way communication between various power smart grid nodes (i.e., smart meters, aggregator, and the utility company) to enable efficient and reliable power delivery. This type of communication within a smart grid, however, brings several challenges in protecting these nodes from various types of cyber attacks. An efficient and dynamic hardware-oriented authentication and key management scheme for AMI networks is proposed in this paper as a proof of concept, to demonstrate the potential benefits of IoT technology in smart cities. The proposed scheme is based on a dynamic physical unclonable function (PUF) architecture that extracts a large set of reliable secret keys to authenticate AMI nodes over their corresponding lifetimes provided by the manufacturer. For a secure exchange of the secret keys while preserving privacy, a lightweight encryption scheme is utilized to authenticate AMI smart meters without disclosing the the keys that are exchanged and/or the identity of the meter. Furthermore, the proposed framework will enable different security levels defined by the standards of the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) to ensure a secure communication between AMI constituents. The proposed scheme is implemented on 10 FPGA boards (Nexys4 DDR Artix-7 with 28 nm). The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is highly secure and efficient in terms of authentication time and data storage requirements.