Lightweight Authentication Protocol for Smart Grids: An Energy-Efficient Authentication Scheme for Resource-Limited Smart Meters

Lewis Nkenyereye (), Abhijeet Thakare, Priyanka Khataniar, Raju Imandi and Pavan Kumar B N
Additional contact information
Lewis Nkenyereye: Department of Computer and Information Security, Sejong University, Seoul 05006, Republic of Korea
Abhijeet Thakare: Department of Industrial Engineering, Yonsei University, Seoul 03722, Republic of Korea
Priyanka Khataniar: Department of Computer Science, Bodoland University, Kokrajhar 783370, Assam, India
Raju Imandi: Computer Science and Engineering Group, Indian Institute of Information Technology, Sri City 517646, Andhra Pradesh, India
Pavan Kumar B N: Computer Science and Engineering Group, Indian Institute of Information Technology, Sri City 517646, Andhra Pradesh, India

Mathematics, 2025, vol. 13, issue 4, 1-24

Abstract: The limited resources available for Smart Meter (SM) devices on large-scale Smart Grid (SG) networks impose several constraints on SMs authentication. Currently, available authentication schemes are not suitable for this type of network. In particular, factors such as power and memory consumption impact the protocol efficiency and the device lifetime. Furthermore, high computational complexity leads to scalability issues in real-world scenarios, wherein large SGs need to handle a huge number of requests coming at a high rate. In this paper, we propose a lightweight authentication protocol for Smart Grids (LAP-SG), a novel scheme accounting for real resource-constrained SM providing reduced computation power, memory requirements, communication overhead, and electricity consumption. We prove the security of LAP-SG using both informal security analysis and a formal security model. We further prove the security of LAP-SG by testing it using AVISPA and ProVerif tools, showing its security against all known attacks. To assess LAP-SG performance in a real-world scenario, we measure its performance using the configuration of the Atmel family of SM devices. When compared to the state of the art, LAP-SG attains three times Smaller computation cost, reduced communication costs (up to 400 bits), and nearly four times lower storage cost.

Keywords: Smart Grid communications; energy network security and privacy; network architecture and protocols (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/13/4/580/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/13/4/580/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jmathe:v:13:y:2025:i:4:p:580-:d:1587692

Access Statistics for this article

Mathematics is currently edited by Ms. Emma He

More articles in Mathematics from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().