Certificateless two-party authenticated key agreement scheme for smart grid

Smart grid is a fully automated power transmission network. It monitors and controls each user and grid node to ensure bidirectional flow of information and power between all nodes. It is an important issue that how to achieve secure sharing of information among numerous communicating agents in the smart grid environments. Authenticated key agreement (AKA) is a good option to enable secure communication between the smart meter and utility. In recent years, several AKA schemes have been put forward for smart grid environments. There are two shortcomings in these schemes: First, they are constructed from traditional public key infrastructure (PKI) or identity based cryptography (IBC), so they suffer from certificate management problem or key escrow problem. Second, the security proofs of these schemes were done in the random oracle model (ROM). It is well known, a cryptographic scheme proven to be secure in ROM is not necessarily safe in practical applications. In this paper, we present a certificateless two-party authenticated key agreement (CL2PAKA) scheme for smart grids, then provide the security proofs in the standard model. Our scheme does not require pairing operations and requires only four scale multiplication operations, so it is more efficient than previous ones. (C) 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.