A Robust Key Exchange and Tamper-Resistant Protocol for HAN and NAN Networks in Smart Grids

Smart grids (SGs) rely on home area networks (HANs) and neighborhood area networks (NANs) to ensure efficient power distribution, real-time monitoring, and seamless communication between smart devices. Despite these advantages, the use of public communication channels in HAN and NAN networks introduces critical challenges, such as vulnerability to impersonation, physical tampering, and scalability issues in resource-constrained environments. These issues compromise the stability, reliability, and security of SG environments. Existing protocols often fail to adequately address these challenges, particularly in ensuring resistance to physical tampering of supply lines and impersonation attacks. Additionally, they struggle to minimize the computation, communication, and energy costs associated with securing a resource-constrained SG environment. Therefore, we propose a robust key exchange and tamper-resistant protocol for HAN and NAN networks to address these limitations. The proposed protocol leverages the physical unclonable function (PUF) mechanism to offer physical tampering resistance to smart meters. We validate our protocol formally using the Random or Real (RoR) model, which confirms its security robustness. Additionally, our informal security analysis highlights the protocol’s resilience against impersonation, physical tampering attacks, etc. We analyze and compare the performance of the proposed protocol, which further demonstrates our protocol’s effectiveness and security compared to competing protocols. Moreover, the proposed protocol achieves resource efficiency with 45.99% and 58.85% substantial reductions in computation overhead and energy overhead, respectively, compared to competing protocols. These results showcase the protocol’s enhanced security and practicality for resource-constrained SG environments.