Provably Secure Efficient Key-Exchange Protocol for Intelligent Supply Line Surveillance in Smart Grids

Intelligent supply line surveillance is critical for modern smart grids (SGs). Smart sensors and gateway nodes are strategically deployed along supply lines to achieve intelligent surveillance. They collect data continuously and transmit it to the control centre in real-time. It enables real-time monitoring, fault detection, and efficient energy management across distribution networks. This advanced surveillance system ensures continuous monitoring of supply lines, detecting anomalies, and optimizing operations to maintain the stability and reliability of the SG. However, the reliance of all participating nodes on public communication channels to transmit supply line surveillance data exposes these systems to critical cyber attacks. These cyber attacks include impersonation, physical tampering, ephemeral secret leakage (ESL), and desynchronization attacks. To address these issues, existing key-exchange protocols often fail to ensure robust security while imposing high computation and communication overheads, limiting their practicality for resource-constrained environments. Therefore, we propose a secure and efficient key exchange and tamper-resistant authentication protocol using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and physical unclonable functions (PUFs). The PUF mechanism provides robust resistance against physical tampering and cloning attacks, ensuring enhanced physical security for supply line devices. We validate the security robustness of the devised protocol using the random or real (ROR) model. Furthermore, informal security analysis demonstrates the protocol’s robustness in rigorously resisting various attacks, including physical tampering, impersonation, ESL and desynchronization. Moreover, we determine the performance evaluation that reveals the protocol’s superior efficiency compared to competing protocols, achieving significant reductions of 28.64% in computation overhead and 9.96% in communication overhead.