PUF-based Lightweight Mutual Authentication Scheme for IoT-based Smart Grids

Smart grids have paved the way for the amalgamation of electricity and the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT enables communication of important data, such as electricity consumption, between the smart meter and the server. At the same time, it makes the system vulnerable to cyber-attacks as the IoT devices are resource-constrained in nature and not equipped with adequate in-built security. Thus, secure and lightweight authentication schemes are of utmost need. Existing literature on lightweight authentication schemes are either computationally heavy specifically during authentication operations or need high communication and storage requirements. This paper mainly focuses on authentication phase as it is executed many times in the lifespan of an IoT device compared to the device registration phase. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a lightweight mutual authentication scheme that can protect the system from various attacks such as man-in-the-middle (MITM) and replay attacks. The proposed scheme uses physically unclonable function (PUF) primitives of IoT devices to alleviate the long-term storage requirement in the devices and further makes the scheme secure by achieving operational asymmetry. Unlike many existing schemes, our proposed scheme performs the device enrolment phase through the insecure channel as in many real-world applications. We have verified the security of the proposed scheme through formal and informal analysis. Further, we have done a test-bed implementation and analysis using off-the-shelf available hardware to represent IoT devices. In all the analysis, it is observed that the proposed scheme is lightweight and secure compared to the state-of-the-art schemes.