A provably secure identity-based access control scheme for renewable energy Internet of Things

—The Renewable Energy Internet of Things (REIoT) serves as a sustainable solution to climate warming and environmental pollution, which enhances the stability and reliability of renewable energy systems (RES) by status acquisition of sensing devices (SDs) and intelligent processing of edge devices (EDs). However, the communication channel between SDs and EDs is vulnerable to potential attacks, such as impersonation, man-in-the-middle, and physical capture attacks. Moreover, the sensitive identity information of SDs and EDs cannot be openly disclosed during communication within the REIoT environment. To tackle these security issues, an identity-based device access control scheme for the REIoT (IBAC-REIoT) is proposed, which establishes a secure communication channel between SDs and EDs after mutual authentication. Access control is then conducted using pseudo-identity to ensure device anonymity and untraceability. To validate the proposed IBAC-REIoT's security, a comprehensive security analysis has been conducted, incorporating the widely accepted real-or-random (ROR) model-based formal security analysis, informal security analysis, and formal security verification using broadly accepted automated validation AVISPA tools. Finally, through the comparative analysis with other schemes, it is proved that the proposed IBAC-REIoT is superior in security features, computational and communicational cost, particularly in alleviating burden on SDs. •The communication between sensing and edge devices in the renewable energy IoTis vulnerable to network attacks.•Authentication and access control schemes can effectively solve secure communication problems.•The solution needs to have the ability to resist physical capture attacks, as well as anonymity and untraceability.•A trade-off needs to be struck between security features and computational and communication costs.