AP-HBSG: Authentication Protocol for Heterogeneous Blockchain-Based Smart Grid Environment

In the past, more research has been undertaken on the security of the smart grid (SG), with the aim of securing the SG in a manner that takes into account devices with limited resources, e.g., smart meters (SM). Consequently, several protocols for authenticating communicating participants in the SG and safeguarding the transfer of their keys have been devised over the years. However, most existing protocols work in a homogeneous context, which means that different entities operate in the same cryptographic settings. In addition, the majority of them are subject to a single point of failure, meaning that if a central device fails, all connected devices fail as well. To mitigate the previously mentioned issues and maintain the security of the SG network, an authentication protocol for heterogeneous blockchain-based smart grid environment (AP-HBSG) is designed. In the first part, an anonymous and heterogeneous certificateless authentication protocol is designed to secure and execute the session key agreement process. In addition, one participant belongs to a certificateless public cryptography (CL-PKC) whereas the other participant belongs to a public key infrastructure (PKI). In the second part, a blind signature is used to add authentication security within the blockchain nodes. Besides, a random oracle model (ROM) is used for the security analysis of the proposed protocol and we prove that it is secure under discrete logarithm (DL) problem and computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) problem. The performance analysis shows that our proposed protocol has a lower computational and communication cost than other recently proposed protocols.