Secure Anonymous Key Distribution Scheme for Smart Grid

Abstract

To fully support information management among various stakeholders in smart grid domains, how to establish secure communication sessions has become an important issue for smart grid environments. In order to support secure communications between smart meters and service providers, key management for authentication becomes a crucial security topic. Recently, several key distribution schemes have been proposed to provide secure communications for smart grid. However, these schemes do not support smart meter anonymity and possess security weaknesses. This paper utilizes an identity-based signature scheme and an identity-based encryption scheme to propose a new anonymous key distribution scheme for smart grid environments. In the proposed scheme, a smart meter can anonymously access services provided by service providers using one private key without the help of the trusted anchor during authentication. In addition, the proposed scheme requires only a few of computation operations at the smart meter side. Security analysis is conducted to prove the proposed scheme is secure under random oracle model.