HAP-SG: Heterogeneous authentication protocol for smart grid

Authentication and key agreement (AKA) methods are designed to ensure that only authorized entities are communicating and to ensure that their communications are secure. In contrast, the majority of designed protocols are homogeneous, meaning that communicating entities share the same cryptographic setting. A smart grid (SG) is nonetheless a complex system with a diverse network. Thus, SG interconnects a large number of end devices, intermediary devices, and systems that are part of distinct cryptographic environments. We therefore suggested a heterogeneous authentication protocol for smart grids (HAP-SG). In the proposed protocol, the smart meter (SM) belongs to a certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC) environment, whereas the service provider (SP) belongs to a public key infrastructure environment (PKI). HAP-SG ensures that only authorized SM and SP communicate and that their communications are kept secret, despite the fact that they belong to separate cryptographic environments. Security of HAP-SG depends on the difficulty of the elliptic curve discrete logarithm (ECDL) problem. On the other hand, for security analysis, the random oracle model (ROM) is utilized. Experiments show that our protocol is more efficient in terms of computation costs and communication costs.