Decentralized and provably secure authentication for smart grids via XTR and blockchain

Abstract

Smart Grid (SG) has garnered significant attention due to its exceptional stability, reliability, and flexibility. Ensuring secure communication between Smart Meters (SMs) and the Data Aggregator (DA) requires not only mutual authentication but also the establishment of a consistent session key. However, existing schemes exhibit limitations in terms of security or communication overhead, making them inadequate for practical SG applications. So, this paper proposes a blockchain-based identity authentication scheme for SG that leverages the eXtended Tower Representation (XTR) public key system. By integrating blockchain, the proposed scheme enables rapid re-authentication between SMs and the DA upon reconnection, effectively mitigating the risk of system paralysis caused by single-point failures while ensuring the integrity and security of private information. A informal security analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme resists Key Compromise Impersonation (KCI) attacks, replay attacks, and impersonation attacks, while maintaining forward secrecy. Meanwhine, the security of our proposed XMAS scheme using the Canetti and Krawczyk (CK) attack model is completed, which demonstrates its resilience under the random oracle model. Furthermore, comparative evaluations with other schemes in terms of computational delay, number of cryptographic operations, and communication overhead show that the proposed scheme outperforms existing approaches in both security and overall efficiency. For example, the computation times and communication overhead are reduced by up to 88.66% and 80.65% respectively. In conclusion, the proposed method provides an effective and efficient solution for enhancing the security of communication between SMs and the DA in the Smart Grid.