An enhanced anonymous identity-based key agreement protocol for smart grid advanced metering infrastructure

Sprouting populace mass within the urban areas furnishes critical challenges of providing uninterruptible community services to fulfill the primitive needs of inhabitants in smart cities. Smart cities facilitate and uplift the living standards of inhabitants through various smart systems or infrastructures, and smart grid is one of them. Secure transmission is a key requirement in the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) of most smart grids, and key establishment cryptographic protocols can be used to achieve such a requirement. Designing efficient and secure key establishment protocols for AMI remains challenging. For example, in this paper, we reveal several weaknesses in the identity-based key establishment protocol of Mohammadali et al (published in IEEE Trans Smart Grid, 2017), which is based on elliptic curves. We then improve their protocol and prove its security in the random oracle model. We also demonstrate that the improved protocol achieves both anonymity and untraceability, before presenting a comparative summary of the security and computational overheads of the proposed protocol and several other existing protocols.