Lightweight Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol for Smart Power Grid Systems Using PUF

The Smart Power Grid (SPG) is pivotal in orchestrating and managing demand response in contemporary smart cities, leveraging the prowess of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Within the immersive SPG environment, the ubiquitous deployment of smart meters stands as a testament to their paramount importance in the realm of vigilant monitoring and oversight. These smart meters are installed on high-tension electricity lines and transmit information about electricity outages and other issues to the utility center. To access services from utility centers, smart meters need to communicate securely over a public channel, even though the network itself is insecure. However, potential attacks from adversaries ({\mathcal {A}}_{d}) can exploit this communication. Therefore, protecting this communication is of utmost importance. Several privacy-preserving authentication protocols designed for SPG have been introduced in the literature. Nevertheless, a significant number of these protocols exhibit vulnerabilities to diverse security attacks. This article introduces a lightweight and anonymous authentication protocol specifically designed to address these concerns in the SPG environment. Our protocol ensures both security and efficiency, surpassing other comparable protocols in terms of its lightweight nature. By employing both formal and informal analysis, we showcase the robustness of our protocol against significant attacks while remaining lightweight. The proposed protocol provides added security features and incurs 23.8879% lower computation cost than related protocols. Consequently, our protocol is highly suitable for implementation in the SPG system.