Dynamic Ephemeral and Session Key Generation Protocol for Next Generation Smart Grids

Smart grid networks offer two-way communication between the smart meters and the utility service providers (USPs). This enables the USPs to analyze real-time data emanating from the consumers and offer dynamic adjustments to the power generation and transmission. However, the periodical transmission of consumption reports from the smart meters towards the USPs over public channels exposes the exchanged messages to attacks such as eavesdropping, modification and bogus injections. Consequently, the power adjustments executed may not be occasioned by consumer requirements but by malicious entities within the smart grid network. To curb this, numerous schemes have been presented in literature. However, majority of these protocols are either susceptible to attacks or are inefficient. In this paper, a dynamic ephemeral and session key generation protocol is presented. The security analysis shows that if offers entity anonymity, mutual authentication, forward key secrecy and untraceability. In addition, it is shown to be resilient against typical smart grid attacks such as offline password guessing, denial of service (DoS), packet replays, privileged insider, man-in-the-middle (MitM), impersonation and physical capture. In terms of performance, it has the least execution times and bandwidth requirements among other related protocols.