A Lightweight Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol for Smart Grid Communication

The rapid development of 6G makes Smart Grid (SG) in urgent need of more lightweight authentication protocols. SG is a revolutionary solution for the future energy industry. However, the SM typically has limited computing resources that makes it difficult to implement traditional security measures directly. In this paper, we propose a lightweight authenticated key agreement protocol that has the notable performance advantage while maintaining a security level comparable to the currently existing SG authentication protocols. Our authentication protocol improves the efficiency over existing protocols by at least 50%. Meanwhile, we reduce the use of at least one cryptographic primitive compared to previous protocols, which makes it more suitable for resource-constrained environments.