Efficient, Reliable and Fault-Diagnosable Authentication Scheme for Smart Grids

Authentication is a crucial requirement for smart grid communications. However, the current authentication approaches in the smart grid relying on per-packet signature and per-signature verification schemes introduce heavy costs for computation and communication. Furthermore, despite being much desired by the electric power industry, there are still no efficient fault diagnosis tools to support the smart grid’s authentication management yet. Thus, currently, the smart grid’s authentication requirements cannot be satisfied due to its very nature of having limited computation/communication resources in its component devices and of placing a high priority on fault protection and diagnosis. In this paper, we present an efficient yet reliable scheme to authenticate delay-tolerant smart metering data in the smart grid communications. Cryptographic technologies like batch verification, signature amortization and signature aggregation are adapted to reduce both the number of public key operations and communication overheads. We further contribute two efficient fault diagnosis algorithms to pinpoint forged signatures if any. We have implemented a software package to accomplish our proposed authentication scheme and faults diagnosis algorithms (http://www.bigupload.com/en/file/33615/authsg.zip.html). Experimental results and performance analyses show that our scheme is able to provide significant gains in performance.