Secure authentication protocol for home area network in smart grid-based smart cities

The Internet of Things (IoT) allows better solutions for managing challenges such as reliability and power quality in a smart grid environment. It also assists in adopting smart grid measures in smart city development. A smart meter in the smart grid environment must securely access services from a service provider via public channels. An adversary can pose several security vulnerabilities as the communication occurs through a public channel. Various researchers recently conducted several research types to determine the most challenging problems with the smart grid. The security features like integrity, authentication, and confidentiality are indispensable requirements of the smart grid environment. On the other hand, different objects like smart meters in the smart grid environment are resource-constrained, posing in designing lightweight security protocols. Hence, we propose a lightweight mutual authentication scheme to offer surveillance to smart meters in smart grid infrastructure. We analyze the suggested protocol against well-known security threats. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the protocol to illustrate its efficiency. [Display omitted] •We devised a mutual authentication scheme for smart meters and service providers in a smart grid environment.•The designe protocol exploits a physical unclonable function for resisting physical attacks.•The designed protocol provides session key security and can withstand various attacks from both passive and active attackers.•The proposed scheme also requires significantly less communication and computation costs than related schemes.